Nobody Knows Why It’s Blue
We have 6 at the moment but you can bet by the end of the year with YOUR help we will have enough for a top 10 list of Blue Screen of Death type errors seen in the DOOH world.
We received two new Blue Screen of Death pictures recently (the most recent taken over the previous weekend is shown above) – these errors by the way needn’t be Windoze oriented although in both these cases they are – shame, Ed. We are happy to except other OS errors and screen problems if you can find them.So, on to the newly received pictures and we think deserving to go straight in at number 1 is this ECE Flatmedia installation in the Limbecker Platz shopping centre in Essen, Germany. It’s a Scala installation.
At number two is one of our favourites (it’s NOT a new picture or a repeat of the occurence). This is the CBS Oudoor / TELentice failures that were common a year ago, this one dates from July 2008 AND to be fair we haven’t seen any errors like this on the network now for some time. Number three is new in and is from Manolo Almagro seen recently on his travels in Asia – an interactive version of Adwalker. WHOOPS. At number 4 is the Liquid Digital / Retec Digital WHSmith WHScreen network in London travel hubs – note there were multiple screens showing BSOD within the store – everything we were told running off a single server that had failed. This was at Paddington overground railway station. Number 5 is a very poor (Real) Estate Agency chain in the UK, a picture taken late last year in rural England. Mind you with the garish blue and orange colour scheme they chose to try and display houses for sale, perhaps a BSOD was the best thing that could have happened to the display.At number 6 we have an accident prone Coca Cola vending machine. First seen at the DSE trade show (NOT the place to get a BSOD) – the hardware was by Samsung and software by Sapient. Samsung we guess figured they’d sell a bunch of 50″ LCD touchscreen with every vending machine.
July 27th, 2009 at 13:09 @590
Blue screens means hardware/OS issue, it is “better” than having the cursor arrow in the middle of the content… (issue seen many times on screens).
July 27th, 2009 at 14:42 @654
Guess they should have purchased Cisco DMP’s. Then they wouldn’t have that problem.
July 27th, 2009 at 16:18 @721
This is a good BSOD, probably 10x the size of 1-6 put together: http://digitalsignagecanada.blogspot.com/2009/07/bsod-at-paris-casino.html
July 27th, 2009 at 20:04 @877
Blue screens are not (as noted above) the only mode of failure for these installations, just the most photogenic ones. A blue screen is often a result of problems with hardware, drivers, software or older operating systems that are not updated. The rapid growth of the industry has attracted a lot of new players and fostered bad habits by some. These instances hurt the industry as a whole; hopefully the bad installations will become rare as the industry matures and customers demand greater accountability by their vendors. Windows is a solid product when properly deployed and maintained, we put pressure on car manufacturers to build safer cars but we don’t blame them for bad drivers.