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Digital signage and 'high availability': Keep it simple to keep content flowing

Signage manufacturers are taking a page from network and data comm vendors and installing complex mechanisms to keep content constantly on — yet savvy project owners know to explore simple routes to keep signage content up and running at all times.

Digital signage and 'high availability': Keep it simple to keep content flowing


By Glen Young, Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Philips Signage Solutions Division at Envision Peripherals Inc.

High availability is a term used in data communications. It means the data that's being transmitted and users depend on is constantly available in the network. No ifs, ands or buts. It's there all the time, and when you have "high availability" the stream of data is continual, and there is no lost data.

That term is slowly creeping into the digital signage world, and it's taking on increasing significance as digital signage technology rapidly moves forward. Both existing owners and new prospective ones would be best served by getting a good handle on the "what" and "how" high availability works for their signage.

So, let's try this high availability on signage. A business owner definitely want his or her advertisements, fast food menus, product information, videos and all  sales content to appear without a single glitch. They certainly don't want anything to happen to suddenly ruin customer messages. They want all their content to appear smoothly. 

Just like buying insurance, business owners want protection that covers any accident. Accidents also make things go wrong with a PC-based media player, such as power outages or operating system crashes, or a connection loss between the player and display... However, the screen won't go blank because you have failover insurance.

Virtually all consumer and commercial displays offer a "input signal auto-detection" feature. But, it's not the failover one. That input signal auto-detection simply rotates the signal detection on input by input to determine if in fact the signal is available. For example, a VGA input signal is first tried. If there’s no signal, a HDMI signal is then attempted, and then those attempts move on to DVI to check all the input components to determine if there's an input signal.

Other commercial displays provide failover on a pre-select input when the primary input does not function. For example, when the primary input, HDMI, doesn't properly function, the display switches to operate on the pre-selected failover input, VGA, automatically. Therefore, the display doesn't have to "go loop around to see which one has it."

However, both auto-detection and pre-select input failover are costly insurance for the business owner as a way to prevent content playback loss. What's worse is that you have to hook up two media players to one display; it requires two PC-based media players concurrently running content. Moreover, this configuration setup increases the system complexity as well as utility cost.

Here's where the old KISS adage comes into play. Keep it simple. Once a signal goes down from the primary input, it can go to a USB, like that shown in Fig. 1. All failover files — images and video alike — can go there. This means if any signal goes down, if the display cannot play back from the player, it'll automatically go to the USB and play the pre-saved file from the USB thumb drive. Hence, this failover mechanism becomes simple, easy and affordable for your digital signage. However, it's important in this case that the display is smart enough to pick back up the origin of the signal. This way, this mechanism can return the signal to the original state once the signal is applied back. It is the signage version of high availability.

Glen Young is senior product marketing manager of Envision Peripherals Inc. for Philips Digital Signage North America in Fremont, California, and he has two decades-plus of system design and architecture and product/strategic marketing experience spanning semiconductors, network appliances and digital signage. He can be reached at glen.young-mmd@epius.com.

Cover image courtesy of PEOSoldier.

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6525 Carnegie Blvd // Suite 200 // Charlotte, NC 28211


At PPDS, we help bring the digital to life. We’re part of the largest display manufacturer in the world, TPV Technology. And we proudly hold the exclusive global rights to bring Philips branded digital signage, LED displays, professional TVs and monitors to life. What’s more, we have the innovation to bring that together with complementary.

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