What Display Daily thinks: Sometimes the simplest solution to a problem is the best one, you know, the Occam’s Razor thing. So it should be with digital signage: paper is expensive and bad for the environment, digital displays are better.
Seems simple enough, but it seems to lack the same impact as an opportunity. At least in terms of general public awareness, meaning that you really don’t see a concerted effort to promote modern display technology as being a sound replacement for the vast areas of display real estate occupied by paper.
I was in Times Square, in New York, recently, and there’s probably not many other places in the world that stand out for digital signage as it does. I took a few photos of the displays there, and while it is great to see these giant screens from a distance, they kind of look grubby and damaged up close.
There’s probably a law of diminishing returns on the maintenance of large digital displays, like the ones in Times Square. Makes me wonder how the Las Vegas Sphere will hold out over time, especially if it needs to eke out profits or keep costs down. I mean, is there a tusnami of display tile failures just waiting to happen at some point, after a surge in digital signage uptake?
Still, taking out posters with digital displays, taking out announcement boards, menu boards, and the like with displays makes absolute sense and should be a sort of form of sustainability urgency. I am sure there are plenty of arguments about the future sustainability costs of digital signage as they deteriorate or, because of their use of energy. That’s really the problem with doing the sustainability math: it can go either way over time.
Yet, we have become used to reducing our paper consumption by moving more and more documents online. Think about digital signatures and contracts. That means that we should really expect a much higher impact from a transition from paper signage to digital signage. I suspect that one of the issues is the distribution channels for digital signage are , for the most part, professional AV distribution channels with a range of pricing and services that probably doesn’t scale down very easily.
We’re not really quite there, yet, with a more accessible digital signage sales channel, one built for rapid adoption and growth. You’d think Adobe or Canva would have come up with a tie-up or channel for digital signage, being ideally positioned to provide the end-product output, the digital signs.
It that an impractical approach or is it a lack of imagination on the part of the display industry?
Leicester College Replaces Paper Signage With Digital Signage
Leicester College has over 26,000 students and 1,600 staff across multiple campuses. The college installed 52″ and 54″ iiyama screens with the nsign.tv software platform embedded to provide information, updates, and emergency notifications.
The PR surrounding this installation talks mostly about the reduced environmental impact of the displays versus paper signs, the real-time relevant content, the ease of centralized management, support for both technical and non-technical users, and the flexibility to relocate mobile screens.
The college sees it as phase 1 of a larger project to extend the digital signage network to more areas across campuses in the future.
