Digital signage is an emerging market which has grown quickly in the last 3 decades. An increasing number of businesses are deploying digital signage since the public begin to comprehend the effect of such systems. If you are a software developer, this presents a terrific opportunity to enter this fast growing market area. Traditional Signage systems used a wide variety of DVD players and consumer-grade PC systems as their media search engine. In recent decades, numerous committed appliances-type media players have emerged and are forming the fastest growing technology industry in the business.
Compared To the classic consumer-grade equipment, the technical media appliances provide better hardware reliability and simplified applications programming interface. This combination creates a new chance for software developers that were not available before. Digital Signage player use the W3C SMIL open standard as their application programming interface API. SMIL is an XML-based mark-up language sharing roots with the HTML language popular for web development. SMIL adds the advantage of simplicity in comparison with the normal Windows or Linux environment. A normal multi-zone animated content can be written in SMIL in as little as a dozen lines of code, in contrast to a normal implementation in Windows that would require at least ten times more work. The SMIL language also offer innovative features such as synchronization, parallel scheduling, playback, event reporting that greatly enhance the robustness of a system composed of SMIL players.
The SMIL standard has been embraced by an increasing number of digital signage vendors in the business. A number of large scale systems with thousands of SMIL players are set up worldwide, showing the maturity and scalability of the technology. Several Low cost media players can be found on the market. Software developers interested in starting up in the marketplace needs to seriously consider leveraging the maturity and cost effectiveness of the technology now. And do not forget, customer impatience can become infectious. In addition, in places, like coffee shops or concessions, high-margin items that customers add to their buy in the last minute are exhibited in cases which could be obscured by long lines. When customers eventually get to the front, they are confronted with more choice and need to start their decision-making process once more, slowing down trade speed still further. In these locations, cloud based digital signage indicators and plasma screens narrowcasting menu options and choices have a double advantage, speeding up the traces and providing additional advertising opportunities to market those high-margin, impulse items, thereby providing a double boost to earnings streams.