The Five Screens

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

Only last week we wrote about the 3rd and 4th Screens

Common wisdom says that the 1st screen is your TV set, the 2nd screen your laptop, the 3rd screen in some shape or form is High Impact, Retail and / or Captive Audience networks (i.e. Digital Out of Home) leaving the 4th screen being your mobile phone!!!

And didn’t we just receive a hell of a lot of mail about whether we were correct or not with the order of the 3rd and 4th screen definitions – these BTW are / were not our definitions BUT what we (still) believe to be ‘common wisdom’ – Google it and we think you will agree with us.

Anyway along come NSR with an article entitled “Can any Screen be a Digital Sign?” in which it tries to include cinema as one of the ‘screens’ and then asks the question “Is Digital Signage the Fifth Screen?” – arrrghhh!!

We think they are missing the point somewhat – the importance of cinema in their eyes pertains very much to their part of the world – and much of the research, execs and books they quote are Indian-centric.

If digital signage (we prefer digital out of home as you know) slips any further down the list of ‘screens’ it will, at this rate, be behind / underneath the GPS Navigation system in your car!!!


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