Reliable digital signage -Never a black or a blue screen

Black or blue screens, messages about failed security updates; those are most certainly among the nightmares of any digital signage- or self-service kiosk system operator. How to avoid this happening to you?

Today’s digital signage technology makes use of all advances that have been made during the last decade to ensure flexible and adaptable computer solutions. However, digital signs are used for 24/7 operation which is quite different from home appliances or computers and equipment used in an office. Therefore conventional PCs are not suitable for this task. Just as you have professional demands on kitchen stoves and other machines used in a restaurant kitchen compared to appliances in a home kitchen, there are special demands on computers used for digital signage and kiosks in stores and in other public environments.

There are a number of things that may cause problems in a digital signage system.

There are several reasons for avoiding fans in media players. Apart from being noisy, dust is dragged into the media players and is accumulated there which eventually calls for vacuum cleaning to avoid fan failure and overheating. In most cases the fans need to be replaced after about three years more or less. This causes a lot of maintenance. Due to low power consumption, the MultiQ products only use passive cooling resulting in noiseless operation without maintenance for many years.

All moving parts result in noise and maintenance. To completely avoid this, the hard drive can be replaced by a flash memory. Today these memories are inexpensive and have large capacity. The MultiQ media players and media monitors make use of these advances. With a system based on an economic distribution of Linux, which fits into less than one GB, the remaining flash memory is enough to house even commercials shot in full HD format. If needed, the internal memory can easily be expanded using an external flash memory.

Security update messages and security updates that fail are common in Windows based systems. When using Linux, you do not have these kinds of problems.

Computers tend to hang themselves sooner or later. A corrupted file gets downloaded to a media player and gets stuck, power transients affect the computer or something never tested before may occur in the software. We all know that PC users are very patient people that accept to do some maintenance work almost every day such as taking care of error messages or restarting the computer now and then. In a public environment the local staff should not and do not want to restart the media players now and then. To solve this, the media players or kiosks must be able to reboot themselves autonomously. In the MultiQ media players and media monitors there are two watchdogs monitoring each other and rebooting if there has not been any signs of life from the other watchdog for a certain amount of time. The watchdogs see to that the media player or media monitor reboots before anyone grabs the phone to call for assistance.

The MultiQ media players and media monitors are based on hardware and software specifically designed for digital signage. They are based on Linux, and do not use any moving parts for cooling or storing the content. This assures for a long and lifetime with no worries and no or limited maintenance. The units have 3 years standard warranty and 5 years as an option. This is similar to the lifetime expectancy for cash register systems which are 5-7 years.

In the long run, reliable hardware and software that require a minimum of service is the key to successful digital signage and kiosk systems. As the number of units in the system increases, these aspects become more and more crucial.

Things that assure for long-time operation free form maintenance and worries.

Lars-Ingemar Lundström
Documentation and Training Manager, MultiQ