It Had To Happen
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
We are sure it must happen but hadn’t seen it before – so very surprised to see THREE of the screens on CBS Outdoor prestigious Digital Escalator Panels (DEPs) not working at Paddington railway station this week – two on the right hand side as you go down and one on the left.
Esprit Digital like to claim that the DEPs are all their own doing when in reality it’s only the Tottenham Court Road DEPs that they were involved in but at least in the rental model / deal they had with CBS Outdoor early days, quick swop-out in case of failure was high on the list of what CBS paid for.
June 28th, 2008 at 15:13 @676
It’s becoming increasingly frequent to see a failed panel. Usually a Windows Explorer error. Off the subject, why do signage technologies have to use Windows Explorer? It’s almost the sole reason (alongside bad drivers causing BSODs) that Windows has a bad name.
What is the mechanism in the tube for monitoring failures? At InfoComm the main topic of conversation for us was our successful monitoring solutions with customers who have been bitten hard in the past by higher than predicted failure rates combined with a lack of automated reporting causing failed screens to stay dead for weeks on end.
Adrian – I remember you having an interest in a monitoring solution a year or so ago – how is that progressing?
July 1st, 2008 at 14:53 @661
Esprit Digital’s invention of DEP’s (Digital Escalator Panels) in 2003 was a world-first solution that created a new advertising medium overnight and was voted The Outdoor Innovation of the Year by the voice of the industry, Campaign Magazine. Other prestigious technology awards recognised the immense difficulty in housing such sophisticated equipment in a vacuum-sealed unit sited in a hot and dirty environment.
Furthermore it was implemented with true entrepreneurial spirit using a payment model based on screen availability, whereby the client only paid if the system worked for over 95% of the time in any given month. 3 years later and we are proud to report that we have achieved an overall reliability rate of over 99% and the client has had to make every payment.
Since then we have delivered nearly 1000 more units for use on the London Underground to equally good effect and as we speak there are more being made in the factory. Unfortunately, due to our client’s policy of dual supply, not all of the escalator screens you have seen are ours and these include the ones at both Paddington and Euston Stations.