The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Screenfeed has, for many years, been one of the primary players in subscription content for digital signage - offering great-looking, fully-automated infotainment feeds that help populate the schedules of screens and get viewers looking again and again.

Now the Minneapolis company is introducing a new service that's a direct play on the no code software movement. Screenfeed Connect is an online toolset that allows users - whether they have developer chops or not - to easily and quickly integrate data sources into fully customizable HTML5 designs and layouts.

The product of two years and 30,000 developer hours, Connect grew out of the frustration of custom content project pitches going nowhere because the clients didn't have the budget. Screenfeed, for example, might need to charge $7,000 to reflect the time needed to develop a finished, automated template, but the client might have a budget for $700.

By putting Connect together, Screenfeed now has a platform that plays to the whole notion of economies of scale. So maybe that $7,000 job could be done for around $700.

I spoke with Screenfeed founder Jeremy Gavin about the roots of Connect, and how it will be available to see and try out this week on the show floor at InfoComm.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jeremy, thank you for joining me for those who don't know what Screenfeed is all about, and I can't imagine there's a lot of those, but nonetheless give me the skinny on what your company does and how long you've been around?

Jeremy Gavin: Yeah. Thanks for having me, and happy to share what Screenfeed is up to.

We started as a service. I started the company in 1999, I believe. We really didn't transition to what is now Screenfeed until 2008. So we've been doing this for Screenfeed, which typically has been known as the provider of infotainment content or data feeds. Like we call it dynamic rich content, that's ready-made. It's been a lot of fun building that. We serve content to over 175,000 screens around the globe, and all types of CMS and on many different types of digital signage networks. So it's been fun to see the industry grow over the last 14 years because we've been involved in a lot of people's networks, making sure everything under the network is running and that the screens are working. We just get to provide them great content that feeds their screens, keeps them fresh, and the purpose to use our content is really, in most cases, it is to get people to watch the screen longer or get them to turn their head and look at it in the first place.

You may have some messages, it could be employee messages, it could be advertisements that you want people to see on the screen, that's maybe the purpose of the screen. But in an exchange you might want to provide them something like news or weather or sports scores to gain their attention, and in some cases, it is to inform them whether it's alerts, weather alerts or traffic. There is some utility to the content that we provide, as well.

And you guys have done some research that kind of validates the whole idea of injecting things like infotainment into schedules that would otherwise just be a series of promotional messages or workplace messages or whatever it may be, that actually does have a positive impact that it does get people to keep looking and remember the next thing that comes up on the screen, right?

Jeremy Gavin: Yeah, absolutely. Certainly when we started we were going off of a gut feeling that, Hey, we should put something on the screens. And truth be told, a lot of our customers probably have said that we need to check a content box. So what can we get that is easy and updates to my screens.

So it's not the same all the time. So you'll get some use from that, just to say, let's just keep our screen updated with something new. But fortunately, we've had opportunities to work with customers who wan