Please Adrian, as a respected member of this community, I expected more from you than this FUD. So hopefully you won’t censor this comment as I feel the need to publically debunk your claims.

1- Xibo devs have day jobs. Great. So do the Ayuda Devs.

2- Trying to “call” an open-source developer is ridiculous. Join their mailing list to contact them.

3- No community? Please. Let’s compare for a second:

OpenSplash.net : Nothing but a WordPress placeholder page and blog posts.

Xibo: Documentation: http://wiki.xibo.org.uk/wiki/Manual:TOC
Active support forums: https://answers.launchpad.net/xibo
5 developers: https://launchpad.net/~xibo-developers
Commercial support and hosting: http://directory.xibo.org.uk/

4- Not interested in talking to you? Are you surprised? They don’t want their project hijacked into being a marketing tool for Ayuda.

5- Their player is even coded in C#, Ayuda’s favorite development language. They should have been able to contribute useful code.

6- Comes with the CMS – Opensplash does not.

Therefore, I am literally at a loss to explain why the world really needed yet another open-source digital signage solution, especially one that doesn’t even work on its own and has been consistently late on the release date.

Where is the release Adrian?

The usual scalability issue is the network pipe at the CMS. The easiest way to sort this out is to host your CMS server on the same network as the clients. If the clients are outside the LAN, then host the server in an internet connected data centre. For example, in the UK Claranet provide ADSL and hosted servers where the server is on the same gigabit network as the ADSL endpoints, so can send to many of them simultaneously.

The one innovation of the past few years that has massively improved scalability is player-side metadata and time based filtering of simple playlists (i.e. some content in each playlist is only valid for play at certain times, rather than the old way of an entire playlist being valid at certain times). This is a feature of almost all players available today as far as I am aware.

Good luck with OpenSplash though, I agree that it might help clear out the low end of the market. However, you guys do know that this is nothing new right? An open source alternative has existed for years and this one actually *includes* the CMS.

http://xibo.org.uk/

We have customers who had installed large networks with proprietary player hardware that only works with the packaged software. Their too far in to change now, but their software/hardware combo has not innovated and do not have the basic features most have now. This is an example where a company trying to offer both the best hardware and software can’t do both amazingly well.

Great CMS software companies should be able to build on the efforts of Brightsign, Spinetix and IAdea – as a few already have. Standards are needed and we’ve been pushing for Media RSS as a standard since day 1 in our company and worked with Signagelive to successfully implement a standard whereas our syndicated content can plug-n-play with any Signagelive player – wether that is a PC or IAdea SMIL based player.

I’ll be interested in seeing how OpenSplash plays out – but I’m all for the notion of creating some standards for players as the end-points as it will benefit those implementing signage.

Note that the need for these features is actually quite rare. The vast majority of rollouts need complex scheduling control capability at the CMS and quite simple playout capability at the player. By simple I mean simple playlists or metadata and time filtering rules attached to content, be that video or Flash. Almost all players on the market can do this. Huge lists of supported video codecs are much less important now that transcoding at the CMS is trivial and quick (e.g. Badaboomit).

Hardnut – Magic Net may not figure in your recommendation list, and it wouldn’t in mine either – but remember that 99.9% of potential customers for signage have never done this before – they have no idea beyond the marketing puff why one product is better or worse than another. I am constantly surprised at how many Magic Net installations I see in the real world. And at how many virus checker popups, blue screens, etc.

Much as we would like it to be another way, the real volume in the signage industry doesn’t come through those of us who know what we are doing and have been doing it for years – it comes from IT departments, marketing departments, small creative agencies (who are still deploying DVD players) and other people who don’t know what we know. To them cost is everything – they don’t see the problems with their decisions until much further down the line when the cost of all the truck rolls involved in swapping out the technology is too great to consider it. So a free player that runs on cheap hardware, which can be driven by any CMS on the market, is a very useful thing. If they put the wrong (cheap) CMS in on day 1, and they then find its limitations, they can afford to replace it. They can’t necessarily do that with their players.

The CMS of the future should (in my opinion):
- support a mixed estate of multiple playout devices
- fit a vertical market really neatly (using their terminology for example)
- have the required scheduling complexity *for that vertical market*
- have the required playout reporting *for that vertical market*
- er…
- that’s it…

{Maintenance reporting and playout measurement reporting (e.g. EPOS, Quividi et al) should be separate tools to my mind. Reports should be available in XML so that turnkey systems can be built from multiple systems from different manufacturers.}

Targetting your next CMS at a vertical enables you to compete much more effectively in that market against generic products. Having a tool such as OpenSplash/IAdea etc means you don’t have to develop a player – that’s a solved problem – get on and build the clever bit – the user interface.

Finally – Adrian, why do I have a loch ness monster silhouette in my captcha box? Never seen that before!

The true commercial value will be in providing the software, content and services required to install and manage networks of Open Standard devices, regardless of their origin.

IAdea with their SMIL initiative have led the way and provided the impetus for digital signage software vendors to embrace playback technology that are non-proprietary. OpenSplash should not be feared, it should be embraced along with any other hardware or software that drives our industry towards mass adoption.

If digital signage software companies take the approach of ‘It is plays back media, let’s support it’, then customers will have true choice and flexibility, where playback technology is interchangeable with any digital signage CMS platform.