In August last McDonald’s chose a leading IT services provider to run their Point-of-Sales signboards, for a period of five years across Ireland and UK. And recent pics, such as these, show why there is so much talk about the role Ubuntu plays in signage technology all over the world.
Some of the leading professional signage service providers look towards Ubuntu because of two aspects- one it’s open source lineage and second to provide razor-sharp technical precision in running these new-age, digital message and advertising boards.
Ubuntu has been running not just personal Desktops but Business comps, Notebooks but Digital Signage Players as well. This is because, Ubuntu is developed to run on X86 CPU and ARM CPUs. Ubuntu OS can be developed to run dedicated Digital Signage Player as well. Now available as apps it would include a remote console and moves the process of digital sign as software as a service on your personal digital devices or company signages. This in turn has opened up scope of collaboration as well as movement of content on server-side.
The most recent update to open source digital signage solutions is the recent MediaSignage Free Digial Signage Player now available on Amazon. This app is available for the Android Mobile version as well and makes for some stunning performance on tablets as well as phones.
The bane in digital signage industry is to pay licensing fees to proprietary software. Despite expensive annual or use-based subscriptions, typically proprietary software does deliver below par. One the huge risk potential these software run in terms of security breaches. Additionally, most of the leading proprietary digital signage software requires greater hardware capacity and power. To business this implication is enormous as they will have to invest in expensive hardware to support their all-season signage.
Digital Signage environment has adopted Ubuntu (and Debian in some cases) to establish online (iP-based) scenarios. Secure, high-reliability and flexibility that Canonical brings with Ubuntu to develop Digital Signage applications has proved that this open source solution is the better option.
Developers and professionals have found Linux and its family- be it Debian or Ubuntu – ideal drivers to work in the static environment of digital signage. Combining Ubuntu software with VNC and Flash in Firefox has proved to offer stable and dedicated service.
Ubuntu has proved to be the first choice for digital signage adoption not just because of its open source and free software moorings, but its great technical aspect of being able to customize a digital signage application to fit the business, organization or educational application.
Additionally, the huge development community support works to a great advantage in the emerging usage of Ubuntu for digital signage. Most of the leading providers offer choice that allows for integration with external applications.
Now, its McDonald’s and most trams across Europe slowing moving towards Ubuntu-based signage. The increasing adoption of this method of display is because it offers: price comfort, technology comfort and effortless upgrades, plus a great developer community to backup.
