Vincent Serpico, Vice President of Development
Please allow me to indulge in a frightening scenario. It’s the not-too-distant future. All major computer manufactures are engaged in an intense consumer battle. And while all manufactures are deploying the same O/S on their computers, each manufacture has ensured that files created on their brand will only run on their systems.
If this is too scary, please do not read further… it gets much scarier…
You have just finished a huge Digital Signage project for a Fortune 50 customer who will be deploying on thousands of Dell devices. But at the 11th hour, the customer has decided to deploy on HP devices instead. Oh, no! All your work has been for naught… and you must start from scratch!
This scenario is, of course, a dark fantasy conjured up from my deepest nightmares. Or is it? You see, in our industry, there are a number of players with closed systems. That means that content created on one system will not play on another system. I repeat: The hard work you put in to create a Digital Signage project will be lost if your consumer decides to switch output devices.
We all understand why these players want to be proprietary. It’s the same reason Sony did not lease Beta. They want to dominate the industry through hostage tactics. This is bad for so many obvious reasons. When companies are held captive, competition is stifled. When competition is stifled, new and better fails to reach the marker. And when new and better fails to reach the market, the Digital Signage industry suffers as a whole.
I submit: Closed systems will hinder the explosive growth of the Digital Signage industry. And that’s bad for everyone.
When I designed the myriad of output formats in Flypaper, I paid careful attention to be as player agnostic as possible. We spent countless hours testing and retesting our output formats on tons of DS players, ensuring that our Video, single SWF and EXE outputs were compatible across the board. Our philosophy is, “Design once, run everywhere”. And that should be the philosophy of all content creation applications.
A free and open exchange of content formats is vital for our industry. It will help proliferate Digital Signage content. The proliferation will create more jobs and opportunities. And that’s good for everyone.
Next Blog: “The Power of Extensibility”