Digital Signage is emerging everywhere, in an abundant array of form factors and out-of-home locations. With the continuing decline in costs associated with digital displays, computing hardware, and Internet connectivity, connected digital signage is being adapted by a broad range of businesses. Most pronounced in the industry verticals of retail, transportation, education, and hospitality, digital signage is becoming more mainstream as marketers increasingly shift investments towards targeted, audience-focused media.
Today, many of the signage displays are used for endemic or in-store product promotions but non-endemic advertising, especially local ads, will grow as the industry expands and the signage technology platforms become more standardized. A recent Out-of-Home Media Awareness and Attitude study indicated that 63% of the viewers reported that place-based digital advertising has considerably higher recall rates and catches their attention more than any other media including television, web, newspapers, magazines, and radio. Similar to the evolution of the internet industry, digital display technology is also evolving to encompass more audience interactivity and user engagement.
Overview of ANTS Connected Display Platform
ANTS Connected Display is a hosted digital signage web services platform purpose designed for feature extensibility, service scalability, and system redundancy. Based on standard web services, the ANTS platform enables the use of common web content creation and publishing tools, and access to vast amounts of compelling web media contents. The ANTS web services framework also allows easy integration with web design layout and media content, and seamless distribution of the signage display content across technology platforms including mobile devices. The ANTS Connected Display platform consists of the following system components:
The ANTS Connected Display management console is a browser-based application for managing display networks, media feeds, playlists, and playlist schedules, as well as basic tools for creating new content. It provides an intuitive easy-to-use drag-and-drop web interface for managing media feeds, accessing media files, and for customizing various web layout templates.
The ANTS console provides a simple interface for managing and previewing media playlists, and scheduling media playlists and channels. It also provides the capabilities for managing user accounts and a map-based topological display for monitoring and administrating the display devices and display network.
The ANTS Connected Display media player is the controller software for digital signage displays. Supported on both Microsoft Windows and Google Android Linux-based platforms, the ANTS client supports standard HTML/CSS media design layouts and media formats, and supports standard web technologies including Adobe Flash and JavaScript widgets. The ANTS client is optimized for carrier wireless connectivity in limited bandwidth and lossy connectivity environments. The lightweight Windows-based client works with most PC-based hardware such as the AOpen miniPC. The Google Android-based client only works with customized ARM-based computing hardware. The minimum hardware specifications for the media player is in the Forums.
Each display managed by the ANTS Connected Display platform can have an externally accessible companion web site. The content shown on a particular digital signage display is replicated so that it can be accessed from the internet and viewed on a web browser. This same media content can be purposed for mobile devices such as Apple iPhone and Google Android mobile phones.
To make it simple and easy for content creators, marketers, and advertisers to inject content and ads to the network, the ANTS platform provides an easy to user browser-based interface called Community Feed for creating, submitting, filtering, and publishing content to the signage displays.