Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Along with Yasmina Siadatan from Amscreen and many other prominent speakers, rumour is that Andreas Soupliotis, President, CEO and Founder, at Ayuda Media Systems is all set to give a speech.
Pilot cf-220 grizzly
Umm? From a well funded software company (Ayuda) that plays in the OOH space and with a CEO who is a well respected former .NET Evangelist at Microsoft Corporation that should be one interesting presentation!
We asked Andreas what the gist of his presentation would be about and he told us “The explosion of digital signage in recent years has resulted in an overflow of digital signage software vendors, what was once considered cutting edge several years ago, is now basic technology”
He added “Given the economic difficulties and fierce competition, my talk will explore current and future trends, such as free players, free CMS, open source possibilities, consolidation and aggregation of digital signage solutions”.
Oooh! Can’t wait!
September 22nd, 2010 at 14:47 @658
Should be an interesting spiel. There are already a few open source software efforts based on the GNU Public License coming out of a number of universities.
Driven by the hardware vendors’ incentive to bundle software to move hardware and ever increasing competition in a highly fragmented market, trajectory of DS software pricing is rapidly approaching FREE. Chris Anderson, author of “FREE: The Future Of A Radical Price” would be delighted to see this.
In addition to FREE open source, a number of other near-free models are popping up. Consider Rise Vision’s new Google-based platform. for a minuscule monthly fee the reseller gets access to unlimited amount of player licences. The minimal charge is widely advertised and master network licence can potentially be bought directly by the end-user. The reseller’s value prop now relies on auxiliary ‘value-added’ (what a dirty word that is) services to justify their role and value to the project and the end-user.
We are living in interesting times where old economic models are failing and companies need to adapt or fail in the long run. Exciting.
September 23rd, 2010 at 02:37 @151
Dmitry, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you!
September 23rd, 2010 at 08:04 @377
Dmitry there is a danger in confusing FREE and OPEN SOURCE. Free to modify or free of costs? The Rise Vision example (I am sorry I am not familiar with it, and not to deride it in anyway but surely it is just a low cost SaaS offering?).
What we think Andreas is suggesting is a fundamental change in the way digital signage software is written, developed, improved.
OPEN SOURCE does not mean (a) no one owns the code and (b) no one can make money from it.
Personally we look fwd to what he has to say with some interest.
September 28th, 2010 at 04:00 @208
Can’t comment on Ayuda’s talk, however Andreas is speaking an open truth. Digital signage is a solution consisting of a conglomeration of pre-existing software. Some digital signage software today that costs thousands of dollars are little more than glorified Flash players attached to a web server and content management/playlists. The value is from the system integration piece.
Is the player be HTML5-compliant? Is the web server something like Apache? Is the content creation tool open sourced ala GIMP/Inkscape? They can, and today, I suspect if you peered under the hood of some solutions in the market today, they are.
November 23rd, 2010 at 20:09 @881
[…] wanted to make it a fun place to work,” says Andreas Soupliotis, president and CEO. “I remember working in the early days at Microsoft when it was such a fun […]