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Digital Signage

Signing Up

4/1/2007

By Matt Villano

“This is something we want to develop and continue to put in all over campus,” he says. “Keeping our students informed in a timely manner is one of our top priorities moving forward.”

DIGITAL SIGNAGE IDEA: NO MORE GLASS

In Rhode Island, where new state fire laws dictated that all paper signage must reside behind glass, Bryant University students demanded a less archaic solution, to keep them updated on events and changing information. Fifty NEC LCD displays peppered across the campus, working in tandem with Access TV software, were the answer.

At UMass-Boston—another commuter school that had failed to effectively communicate with students via e-mail—technologists mixed NEC displays and VBrick video over IP technology with a different solution: digital content-creation software known as Scala. To create advertisements, students access the software through a web-based interface; once the messages are approved, they air on 50-inch display screens and televisions across campus. John Jessoe, director of the school’s Distance Learning Video Production Center, says that as many as 35 different messages are cycled each day. He notes that feedback indicates students love it.

Importantly, the backbone of the UMass system is unique. Instead of running messages over the IP network (the same network that carries internet traffic), the school constructed a parallel network exclusively for messages and cable television signals that are funneled through the VBrick hardware. Jessoe declines to reveal how much the entire display system cost, but explains that the school currently is in the process of replacing its network switches, and that when this effort concludes, messages and cable alike will be migrated to the IP network so that any user can view anything at any time. With the new switching setup, the school’s IP network will be better able to handle the heavier traffic load.

“Unfortunately, improvements to this part of our network are subject to funding and staffing,” Jessoe says. Though the new switches are a bit of a workaround solution in the short term, they will still benefit the school in the long run. “Believe me: Long-term, this is something we want running together on one network,” he maintains.

Mixing News With Business Know-How

At Texas State University, the drive for digital signage was much broader than simply dispensing information in a timely fashion. Certainly, timeliness was important. But William Chittenden, associate professor of finance at the school’s McCoy College of Business Administration, says he and his colleagues in the Department of Finance and Economics also wanted technology that could project a “real-world atmosphere,” and give business students a taste of what securities trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is actually like.