Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Headquartered in Switzerland, privately-held digital signage software publisher Navori, with more than 75,000 active installations in 90 countries is all set to launch Navori QL at #ISEUROPE. Navori will be demonstrating the product and meeting customers, partners and resellers at booth #12E82.
We are told that the Navori QL digital signage software suite makes playing broadcast-quality video possible even on low-cost PCs. The ability to squeeze that kind of performance out of a cheap box and still keep the CPU overhead low is a really big deal and it will be interesting to see the product for ourselves (an industry insider told us that lab tests suggest even lower-end CPUs are handling things really easily))
Navori seems to have a healthy balance sheet and has steadily grown over the past 14 years. In December 2009, the company opened a subsidiary in North America (in Montreal) and we are told that it broke even by June 2010. Revenue growth in 2010 was in order of 28%, just off the 33% growth the company booked in 2009. Export sales represent 93% of this volume.
Jerome Moeri, Chairman of Navori International SA told us exclusively “Over the last three years, Navori has been developing a next generation Digital Signage software platform from scratch. We think that the current solutions on the market offer an inferior play-out and titling quality when compared to broadcast television. We invested heavily in this product, taking the economic crisis we all faced as an opportunity for innovation in this industry. We now have a proprietary player engine that is frame-accurate to 1/30th of a second, offering a TV look and feel in multiple full-HD quality video streams, but on USD 350 PC platforms.”
He added “We invested the time and resources to introduce a solution that makes even a $350 PC capable of playing back flawless, seamless HD programming with banners, titling, transparency and overlays of unprecedented quality. We offer a true Broadcast TV experience, a face lift for the digital signage medium that was overdue. To achieve this, we designed our own proprietary graphic engine,”
Jerome claims that “The Navori QL platform we’ll be showing at ISE differs from any product now on the market. QL is easy to use and affordable, but doesn’t require compromises.”
Our understanding is that whilst competing software products offer playback accuracy down to each second of video content, Navori QL’s media playback engine has frame by frame video accuracy down to 1/30th of a second. The momentary black gaps common to most systems when playing back-to-back videos are gone using QL. If required, those gaps would need to be designed and programmed back in.
Jerome explained “We’re proud of our Swiss heritage, and we try to apply the same precision and quality to our software platform as the companies that have made our country’s timepieces so famous. Our idea of Swiss Movement is efficient design that leads to extraordinary performance.”
Moeri noted that his Lausanne-based software engineering team reduced demands on computer processing power to roughly half that of competing platforms, elevating playback quality but also increasing the reliability of players by reducing and controlling CPU usage.
The premise-based software (i.e not SAAS) is available in seven languages, and variations of Navori QL can power everything from single screens to huge enterprise networks with hundreds or thousands of screens.
Jerome added “QL represents what we believe digital signage should be – the highest quality, and frame-by-frame accuracy, but at a price that’s affordable and with tools anyone can quickly and easily learn and use.”
Navori QL’s North American launch will take place three weeks later at Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas, Feb. 22-25, with a product demo and meeting area at booth 2028.
January 19th, 2011 at 13:21 @598
Interesting to see this – not a first of course – Inspired Signage could do seamless back to back video and 60th of a second frame accuracy years ago. Interesting that both companies used experience from the Broadcast industry to drive the development. Frame accuracy is probably not very important to signage, but seamless back to back playback definitely is.
I assume they’re using GPU acceleration to do this on low end PCs – will be very interested to see it at ISE.