CBS Outdoor Reply (Well Sort-Of)…
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
On Sunday 13th July (23:00 GMT+1) someone at CBS Outdoor submitted a comment to our site on last Monday’s story “CBS Outdoor’s ‘Restart Your Computer Now’ ”
Purporting to be a ‘Patrick Stewart’ and an owner of a network of 2,000 screens the person in question forgot that their IP address would point right back to the CBS Outdoor network….
inetnum: 81.171.156.64 – 81.171.156.95
netname: SC600-Telehouse
descr: Viacom Outdoor
country: GB
CBS Outdoor was previously Viacom Outdoor of course – the latter being re-branded from 1 January 2007, in line with a change of structure at its parent company.
Their comment in full, complete with bad spelling, is as below…
Author : Patrick Stewart (IP: 81.171.156.94 , 81.171.156.94)
Comment:
where do you get its telentice? I saw a video in youtube that a company called “remote media” owns them.I own a company that manages over 2000 systems, and anyone who says that their systems/soft dont do “the above” are just full of it. It doesnt matter which soft or hard. it just happens. *cnario, broadsing, scala… all do, cause I manage quite a few different soft*
I also see that people take this as a way of saying…” my solution doesnt do that”, well, then you have no systems out there in the real world, cause they do.
Mr Cotterill, with your article you do more damage to digital singage than 1 lcd out of 2000 systems installed *or whatever cbs has* no having a problem. Even 10 out of 1000, whats the percentage?
A couple of points (technically) on the comment …
- TELentice running in embedded Windows XP is definitely the software being used to run the London Underground screens in question
- Display Drive (part of the BF Group) supply most of the screen hardware on the network
- C-nario, Broadsign and Scala which are all mentioned by the comment’s author are of course all primarily Windows based (Broadsign does have a Linux version though we are not sure how often it is used
For those of you who want to check the IP address for themselves, click below…
http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=81.171.156.94
July 14th, 2008 at 11:51 @535
Ooooh – far too much excitement for a Monday morning, especially when I am trying to stop myself from playing with my new iPhone 2.0 software…the only way to stop is to post a comment in reply!
Occasionally I contribute to the site – in an attempt to offer up examples to the DOOH community, illustrating what I am trying to do creatively within the DOOH space. It provides me with to show our work to the DOOH community and for us to provide insight into how and why we did it in an attempt to provoke some discussion and thought. This blog is kind of good for that and from what I have read of the posts so far, always seems to aim to reflect the industry for the benefit of the industry.
Any good, well read blog, in my mind, should also stimulate debate, be a forum to share views and ultimately be interesting. This industry is not short of the interesting bits on all fronts, be they creative, from a media and network ownership perspective or technical.
I think of this blog as thought provoking to a certain extent and a useful mirror on what is happening in the industry right now – it’s certainly prides itself on being up to date. The more we can be made aware of our industry strengths or weaknesses be they creative, network oriented, media, technical or otherwise is surely for the better.
I am not the CEO or DOOH Network Manager of a major outdoor media owner but if I was then I would want to know if my product/service was performing at as close to 100% efficiency as possible or I would at least want to monitor the performance of my network over time. If I didn’t as a media owner, then surely my clients ie my advertisers would – safe in the knowledge that they are getting the best and most consistent offering of service for their clients, the brands – the people who essentially establish our revenue stream…
And, for me, from a purely navel-gazing creative perspective, I would like to know if my creative is ‘on’ or not…
Alex Hughes, Amigo Digital