Linux and Android-powered digital signs lower cost and complexity while adding features and improved security. We look at four open source digital signage options for small business.
Open Source Digital Signage for Small Business
If you’ve spent any time shopping for digital signs for your small business, you might be a tad discouraged at the cost and complexity. But thanks to Linux and Android, you can enjoy a whole new generation of software, services, and devices that range from free to inexpensive, and that offer all kinds of great features.
Amazingly flexible, digital signs can display simple images, slideshows, movies, Web pages, and dynamic content pulled in from the Internet, or whatever sources you want to use. Anything you can do on a computer you can put into digital signage.
Digital Signs: Android or Linux?
Android, the popular Linux variant, is slimmed-down for portable devices such as smartphones, tablets, gaming and media boxes, and desktops and laptops. It also makes a dandy lightweight, power-frugal platform for digital signs. You can stuff an entire Android operating system, plus your multimedia presentations, into a matchbox-sized case and run a big screen with it.
Linux is a mature general-purpose enterprise operating system hardened by two decades of development and use in the most demanding environments, from embedded devices, desktops, laptops, and small servers to mainframes and supercomputers. It’s stable, secure, and adaptable.
So which one is better? Both. If you’re looking for a digital sign system with software, hardware, and support, you’ll find a lot of Android options. If you’re more inclined to do-it-yourself, or have good tech people, then Linux offers a wider choice of software, and you can run it on pretty much any hardware.
Digital signage is just a fancy term for your stuff on a screen—like schedules, commercials, product information, menus, catalogs, order forms, or anything you want. You can use just about any kind of display: televisions, ordinary computers and monitors, small form-factor hardware like the Raspberry Pi, digital photo screens, heavy-duty commercial-grade computer monitors, big outdoor screens, and big free-standing touch-screen kiosks.
Check out Viewsonic and Samsung to see what’s available in the world of video screens. If you can connect a computer to it, you can make it display whatever you want.
Novisign Android Signage-as-a-Service
If you’re new to digital signage, Novisign ranks as one of the easier digital-sign-as-a-service vendors to use. You simply need display screens with Internet access, a Novisign account and away you go. Novisign provides an online editor with a batch of templates, and a free Android app for Android displays.
If you have simple needs and you want non-tech people to manage your signage, give Novisign a try.
Binary Emotions Digital Picture Frame Software
The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little single-board computer originally designed as an educational tool for children, but it’s also a big hit with adults for its low price—starting around $30—and adaptability. Binary Emotions offers several worthy digital sign applications that run on the Raspberry Pi, including the super-easy Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow.
This product displays your images in a full-screen slideshow, and Web pages from a simple text list of URLs. All you do is download and install the Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow operating system to a USB stick, copy your images or URLs to the same USB stick, plug it into the Raspberry Pi and boot up. It runs in protected full-screen mode so nobody can mess with it.
Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow is free to download and use. If you like it, drop a few bucks in the company’s PayPal account. Donations get you access to software with enhanced features.
Xibo Digital Signage
Xibo digital signage software—a slick, sophisticated Web application—runs on your Linux, Mac, or Windows server. It’s a free download with no limitations—you get full functionality whether or not you feed the tip jar.
Running Xibo requires a bit more tech savvy. For an average tech nerd it’s easy to install and setup. Xibo, like most Web apps, has three components: the server, the administration interface, and the display clients. Currently the display client software runs on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and Android. The Windows and Linux clients are free, while the Android client costs about $25 per client.
Not so tech-savvy? Xibo also offers a fast, reasonably-priced cloud platform—Xibo in the Cloud—which saves you the hassle of installing and managing software.
Once Xibo’s installed, you have the full power of your operating system and applications for designing and running your digital signs. You can make simple slideshows in your favorite slideshow app, run videos, use a content management system like Drupal or WordPress for rich dynamic content—the sky’s the limit.
Xibo comes with a batch of content-management tools such as schedulers, templates and layouts, tickers, transitions, and a user-management system for dividing up the work in a secure fashion.
Digital Signage For Free
The Digital Signage company offers a range of digital signage products including the free MediaCloud, MediaPlayers, MediaServer, and MediaHybrid. MediaCloud provides everything you need to create and manage your content, plus decent analytics tools as well. You provide the Internet-connected screens to display your content. This Web application is pure software-as-a-service, so your content runs on any client platform: Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Digital Signage also offers three compact media players. The MediaDroidX runs Android and costs $165. It supports HDMI and all Digital Signage software. MediaBox-200 and MediaBox-300 run Windows and cost $595 and $695, respectively. These include additional functionality such as networking and support for live TV.
The digital signage market is just beginning to explode thanks to Android and Linux, small powerful hardware, and cloud services. If you’re interested in digital signage, as a customer or as a vendor, this is a great time to be in the business.
Carla Schroder is the author of The Book of Audacity, Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook, and hundreds of Linux how-to articles. She’s the former managing editor of Linux Planet and Linux Today.
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