As a father (to 4 lovely daughters), I find it a bit weird to actually Celebrate, and feel the festive event, for a device, important as it is… But indeed, the Android based Players, and the and the echo system it brought with it, literally changed my life!
I came to Gil Matzliah, NoviSign CEO, 11 years ago with the idea of building an open, cloud based Digital Signage platform, to fit the needs of businesses of any size. The idea is good Gil replied, but it is too fragmented, dozens of players, too much Hardware complexity, let’s think…
One day he called, and loudly said – Let’s start! “What happened?” I asked, what is the compelling event? It is simple, replied Gil (well, that is why he is the CEO), Android players can become the default player for Digital Signage, and we can actually make it the new standard!
Gil was right, and we started this great adventure! The Android based Digital Signage was our first offering to the market. It took some time, but indeed turned out to be the right gamble. Android is open, stable, super popular and yes – free! The Android Mini-PC, Streamer, player – whatever you like to call it changed the Ecosystem of the Digital Signage market, turned to cloud based, agile, light, cost effective and on the other hand can provide a scalable, rich in content, simple to maintain displays.
Recently, we also see that LG and Samsung have their SoC operating system Tizen and webOS for signage, however there aren’t any streamers for this and they are limited to one vendor. On the other hand, we see many SmartTV manufacturers using Android as the OS, making Android based signage a default solution on these displays.
Around 5 years back Google introduced chromeOS and started pushing it into the digital signage industry, but it was recently announced that they stop the support and move the users to Android (makes me want to say “I told you!”).
Android based Digital Signage is here to stay – See you on 20th Birthday!
Avi.