Digital Signage as a Retail product

From Today's DigitalSignageToday.com

"Is the future of digital signage for sale, retail?"

"LG Electronics USA recently announced that it had struck a deal with retailer Fry's Electronics Inc. to feature an LG digital signage solution at the chain's 34 nationwide locations and on the retailer's website."

In an earlier article "Unaccounted and Digital Signage" (High Resolution November 13, 2009, I argued that the LCD makers should produce a dual mode LCD platform, one that is capable of performing both as digital signage and as a consumer TV. LG actually has offered such a product and has now gone a step further, the important step, in offering digital signage displays through an electronics retailer. This solves several important problems both for the LCD maker, for brick and mortar retailers, and for the consumer.

With TV volumes stagnant and with increasing sales through on-line retailers, digital signage sales offer a new category and new volume to the retailer. Digital signage LCDs, with all of their unique features such as extra brightness for outdoors, offer a new up-sell opportunity for the retailer to home TV set consumers. For the digital signage purchaser, availability of digital signage displays through local retail outlets offer immediate availability of both displays for new installations, spares availability, and lower overall distribution costs. For the TV Set consumer, digital signage in retail offers the opportunity to take advantage of some of the digital signage features, some of which may not be so obvious.

I have previously argued on one of the digital signage LinkedIN blogs that since most large TVs are delivered (either by purchase on-line or by brick and mortar store delivery) to the home, Individual packaging for TVs was somewhat wasteful. With retail availability of digital signage, presumably, some of the signage will come in multi-packs and I would expect 55" and larger TVs to be available in multi-packs as well.

Beyond that, as I have related elsewhere, At Digital Signage Expo, I asked one of the display industry luminaries if digital signage could ever be as big for the display industry as TV. He gave me a blank stare and could not answer. With US growth rates (in number of screens deployed per year) exceeding 30% through the recession, certainly going forward the volumes could be substantial. Channeling much of this volume through retail will re-energize the entire TV category and lead to increased innovation as new features that are first introduced in commercial product, find their way into the home. In the end, the decision to offer signage through retail may be the biggest innovation in TV since the introduction of flat panels.

Norm

Solar Radiation on Digital Signage

I attended an outstanding webinar on digital signage given by Peter Kaszycki of MRI. In the webinar he mentioned that the morning or evening sun in winter can be as bad for an LCD as the noon day sun in summer. I found some interesting data to back that up.

The chart comes from Research Needs: Glass Solar Reflectance and Vinyl Siding by R. Hart, C. Curcija, D. Arasteh, H. Goudey, C. Kohler, S. Selkowitz in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkely Labs. Solar radiation can be a much larger contributor to the display temperature than than the ambient temperature. In fact data from the study shows that for black vinyl siding, solar radiation can raise surface temperatures to 70 degrees F higher than the ambient. Further, if the display is near a window and gets surface reflections from that window, it can get a double dose, or more, of solar radiation.

This picture shows the side of a house on a winter day when the ambient air was 24 degrees. The light on the side of the house is a reflection from the windows of a neighboring house. The issue of solar radiation and reflections has been well studied in the vinyl siding industry as it is a common cause for product replacement. The LCD being new to outdoor environments will experience the same conditions.

An important additional point to consider... because solar radiation is delivered at the speed of light rather than being conveyed by air currents or thermal conduction, the surface of the vinyl siding or the LCD can equilibrate with the current level of solar radiation within 10 minutes. Unlike heat transfer from the ambient, there are no thermal conduction issues or boundary layer effects. So, if some other surface happens to reflect directly on your digital signage installation for only twenty minutes; but the wrong time of day 20 minutes; that can be enough to cook your installation. Further, as contact burns can be almost instantaneous above 145 degrees and everyone assumes that every large LCD within reach is a touch panel, there could be some consumer complaints as well.

"But all we've discovered is that the blaze was started from a great distance through the refraction and convergence of light." from "Limoney Snickets: A Series of Unfortunate Events"


Norm

Microsoft Becomes a Display Maker

A New Vista for the Display Industry

Microsoft has purchases Perceptive Pixel. As computing has become more and more graphic, Microsoft has increasingly been increasingly involved in display technology. It began with Microsoft Vista, when Microsoft intruded upon what had been Intel's domain in specifying the desired resolution of notebook displays. Microsoft added a different touch in changing the specs from from just a raw resolution (e.g. 1024 x 768) to a desired dots per inch (dpi or pixels per inch.. ppi), more commonly used in the print industry. They also promulgated color fidelity standards, modified their operating system to embrace touch panels, and produced the first "Microsoft Surface" (later renamed when Microsoft introduced its own tablet using that same name).

Perceptive Pixel is a maker of large sized touch panels commonly used by television commentators for weather or for on-camera telestrating. As such, my own impression is that that business might have been a better fit within Cisco with its studio telepresence business. So, there are two questions, first, what is microsoft going to do with Perceptive Pixel? It could be an intellectual property (IP) play in order to gain better control of the direction of touch technology in general. It could be specifically a move to strengthen the position of the Microsoft OS in the digital signage and public information displays market. It could even be part of some greater move into hardware.

The second question is will any of Microsoft's potential competitors respond by purchasing their own touch panel companies or maybe even other display technologies. As the marketing emphasis of new devices is increasingly wrapped around what kind of display the device has, will the major hardware OEMs or others in the market be content to buy common technology from display companies or will they want to own either the IP or or the supply chain to grant them unique competitive advantage. In the initial part of the touch revolution, Apple secured a great advantage by contracting for much of the available production capability (interestingly from a company called Touch Revolution). However, as the industry grows and touch panel production grows, large supply contracts will have to face even larger supply capability. So... how do you maintain competitive advantage for the technology used on your device displays?

Norm

TV New Technology

Introduction
Trinitron, Black Matrix, 36% Transmission (black) glass... In 40 years (1964-2004) the TV had relatively few new technologies that were native to the set that stuck. Of course, there was the VCR and Home Theater, which were literally outside of the box that had tremendous impact. But there was also blue glass, picture in picture, and numerous other must have features that came and went.

Since 2004 and the near simultaneous introduction of HDTV (encapsulating both digital broadcast, aspect ratio change and resolution increase)and flat panels there have been a number of continuing developments. A few of them are discussed here:

Mobile TV/Video
Originally introduced in low resolution formats, resolutions have been increasing as the number of pixels on mobile devices have grown. The capability now equals or exceeds the HDTV in your living room. Video response speed have also increased so that the golf balls don't disappear when they are in flight. However, the big challenge remains sunlight response. How many commercials have I seen of people enjoying their mobile device in bright sunlight when, in fact, the screen would be completely washed out by the sun. An invention or a new approach is needed.

OLED
OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode, may be one answer. OLED technology has been the display technology of the future since FEDs (filed emmision displays) proved a failure. FEDs were originally supposed to give better energy efficiency and improved (CRT-like) viewing than LCDs. However, during the long development cycle, LCDs got better to the point where there was no longer any point to FED technology. OLEDs offer, potentially, better overall viewing characteristics, better energy efficiency, and potentially lower costs as they can be printed on flexible substrates and made in highly efficient roll-to-roll manufacturing. However OLED has been plagued by LCD technology's 40 year head start; the lack of an industry infrastructure to support OLED manufacturing, continuing improvements in LCDs, and a life issue where the colors age differently and produces color shifts as the OLEDs age.

However, the flexible and less breakable OLED has survived and has been implemented in some mobile devices where energy efficiency and break resistance are important. Large TV manufactures are now introducing OLED TVs. The new TVs are coming in at high price points and the success of the technology will depend on riding down the manufacturing cost curve.

LED TV
At one point, one of the larger US electronics companies spent years and huge sums of money developing LED technology to make televisions. That effort failed. But it did help to generate new technologies that are rapidly growing today. LED signs, the big video signs that you see on buildings or billboards, are the manifestation of the original LED effort. LEDs have yet to get small enough to produce resolutions appropriate for a home TV; but if you are making something really big, like a large digital billboard, they are now the technology of choice.

In addition to the signage application, LED technology has revolutionized the lighting industry. They are solid-state and have the advantage that they are not susceptible to shake and impact as light bulbs are. They also have the advantage of being a semiconductor, manufactured in semiconductor processes. This, in itself, has two advantages. First, they are on a semiconductor cost reduction curve rather than a standard cost down curve. This can drive as much as a 29% per year cost reduction vs. an 18% year reduction that would be available with even the best mechanical part cost reduction. Second, this also implies rapid performance improvement as LEDs are now more efficient than conventional light bulbs.

The continued improvement in LED technology has had its effect on the display industry, though not the product that was originally intended. LCD technology is essentially an elaborate light filter that takes white light and convert it to the image desired. The white light, until LED TV was universally supplied by very thin florescent tubes in the back of the LCD. LED TV is a conventional LCD with the florescent tube replaced by LEDs. In some cases the LEDs are on the edge of the LCD and in some cases they are spread behind the LCD. With the change of light source from one (or a very few) florescent tubes to multiple LEDs, the LCD performance has been further improved by the implementation of local dimming. Rather than metering the light solely with the LCD, the light sources in the dark regions of the image are dimmed as well. This both increases energy efficiency and improves contrast.

3D TV
3D TV produces a 3D image by giving one eye a different view of the image than the other. Since there is only one screen, this is accomplished by glasses that aid in filtering the image each eye sees. There are two major types of 3DTV, active glasses type and passive glasses type. The active glasses type actively switch the lenses from transmitting the TV image to blocking (one lens is transmitting while the other is blocking). The passive glasses type rely on the polarization of the LCD light to give different images to each eye.

Auto-stereoscopic (glasses free) 3D TV
For those of us that wear glasses all of the time, wearing glasses to watch 3D TV is not much of an issue. However, for many, it is uncomfortable and the glasses can also be expensive. Further, if the flat panel is being used as a digital sign, where passers-by will not have on 3DTV glasses, #D becomes much more problematic. Consequently, there has been much attention paid to auto-stereoscopic or glasses-free 3D. I have seen many examples that mostly rely on lens stripes on the screen. The lens stripes (lenticular lenses) tend to work only if the viewer is standing in a particular location or one of several locations that align with the lenses. This in not a solution that generally works well and an invention is needed to make this technology real.

Connected TV
Connected TV has been around in some sense since the 26" CRT was introduced. The 26" was a flat square version of the 25" that was designed to be more suitable as both a TV and a computer monitor. Today, of course, if you have a game or DVD connected to your TV then your TV can access internet content.

Smart TV
Smart TV is a step beyond (a big step) connected TV in that there is more intelligence built into the TV. It can recognize who is watching, remember your favorite shows, even suggest TV content that you will probably like given your viewing habits. Smart TV is the migration of the TV from being just the display in a home entertainment system back to being the central platform of an intelligent house.

Quad Resolution (4K) HDTV
When HDTV was first conceived, the resolution was much higher than the then standard NTSC television signal and rivaled standard computer resolutions. Of course, computer resolutions have grown since then as has LCD production capability. As stated above, even some mobile devices now have more resolution than your HDTV. In that sense quad resolution is TV catching up.

Cinema Wide TV

Although HDTV is made in a 16:9 format (the screen is 16/9 times as wide as it is high), movies are commonly made in much wider formats. The original TV was in a 4: 3 format, almost square. If you recall the movie "The Graduate", in the most famous scene in the movie Anne Bankroft undresses in front of Dustin Hoffman. You can not see that scene on a 4:3 screen because Anne Bankroft and Dustin Hoffman are at opposite ends of the screen as it would be shown in a theater. The move to 16:9 makes some improvement. However the 16:9 aspect ratio was something of a compromise as it was square enough that CRTs could be made with that aspect ratio. (There is a fixed ratio between the depth of a CRT and its width, the wider it is the deeper it is. Ratios wider than 16:9 were impractical for CRT manufacture, as even 16:9 proved to be.) Since the CRT has passed into history, there is not much utility limiting televisions to the HDTV standard. Although all content made for broadcast is in 16:9 format, enjoying a movie without leterboxing or having the edges cut off is now possible.

Norm