Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the digital signage crowd, organized and run by my friends at invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich.

They have done these events in Europe for a few years now: an invitation-based two-day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge-sharing and part R&R - from golf to cocktails.

I was along because they needed some eye candy, and there was probably also a California mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from invidis had me there, as well, to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort, and varying schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mikes.

There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive (I've even heard swimming!), here's the second of two round-ups, with four interviews in each.

This one has:

Jeremy Gavin of Screenfeed;

Shawn O'Connell, who recently joined Uniguest;

Stan Richter of SignageOS;

And Trey Courtney of Mood Media.

Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the digital signage crowd, organized and run by my friends at invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich.

They have done these events in Europe for a few years now: an invitation-based two-day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge-sharing and part R&R - from golf to cocktails.

I was along because they needed some eye candy, and there was probably also a California mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from invidis had me there, as well, to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort, and varying schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mikes.

There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive (I've even heard swimming!), here's the first of two round-ups, with four interviews in each.

This one has:

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

Sensors and triggered content have been part of digital signage for probably 20 years, but they weren't widely used for a lot of that time because putting a solution together involved a lot of planning and custom electronics.

A Dutch company called Nexmosphere has changed all that, offering a wide range of different sensors that trigger content to digital signage screens by sensing the presence of people or reacting to an action, like someone lifting a product up from shelf to get a better look.

Nexmosphere has developed its own set of low-cost custom sensors and controllers that make it fast and easy for digital signage solutions companies, including pure-play CMS software shops, to add triggered content capabilities. Nexmosphere focuses on the hardware and makes an API available to partners.

I chatted with CEO Hubert van Doorne about the company's roots and how his customers are now using sensors to drive engagement in retail.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. Can you give listeners a rundown on what Nexmosphere is all about? 

Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yes. I’d love to do that. Nexomsphere is all about sensors for digital signage and to make any digital signage system interactive and by interactive, we do not mean only by pressing a button or touching something on a screen, but it's much more of letting the digital signage installation respond to actually the person in front of it. So it can be a presence sensor. It can be something that you touch or lift the product and that way make an interactive system at Nexmosphere, build a platform of a lot of different sensors that can be hooked up easily to the system and in that way for the system integrator and really help in building this sort of system.

It's something that's been done for decades by a lot of companies who made their own sensors so in that case, it’s not real rocket science, but the beauty of the product is that you can take any of these sensors, bring them together and you don't need any development time to have a proof of concept running and I think that's the real strong point of what we offer. 

Yeah, I've been in this sector for a very long time, and I can remember, when I was working with one company, we had a guy who I think worked out of a motor home somewhere in Arizona or California or something like that, and he would design boards that could be used for very early iterations of sensor-based detection, presence sensor, that sort of thing, but it was a lot of work and there was nothing off the shelf that you could buy to do all that.

I suspect that there's a whole bunch of companies that said, “Oh, thank God, I can just order this and it's already sorted out.” 

Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. It's actually also how the company started in 2015. We were a part of a display company making POS materials for in-store and we developed our own sensor set for Sonos and for Philips to go into the European stores, but what we saw is that the number of stores was heavily declining and the complexity of every system was really growing. So we needed something modular that was not just for one group of displays. We needed something for five thousand, you could make the same part of electronics, but now we need it for 200 stores, something still affordable to build, and that's how the idea started off of making a more standard solution that you can plug and play.

And, first, when we came to the market, everybody was like, “No, we will build something ourselves, that's much easier.” But then, over time you saw these numbers of installations decline. concept stores would only be maybe five stores or ten stores and then slowly evolve over time and that was getting difficult to make something really solid, and robust in small numbers. So that's where we really saw that the companies coming to us. Like indeed, what you say, thank you, you're developing this because it's only a very small part of the total installation cost and compared to a screen or a media player, we are only a fraction of the cost, but it's adding a lot of functionality. So in the end, if it's not working, it's a problem. but it's also not something where you can really save a lot of money because it's only a small part of the budget. 

When you say it's a small part of the budget, are we talking tens of dollars or tens of euros or hundreds of euros on a typical installation? 

Hubert van Doorne: It depends, but if you go for a presence sensor by screen, you have it over, $40-$50 a sensor. So that's only a few percent of the total installation, and of course, we go also to museum experiences where we have 20-40 sensors in one set, and then maybe you go to a few thousand euros, but in the end, it's never a very expensive set of gear, because, in the end, it's just small electronic bits that you can very well pick the right size that you need for your project. So there's very little that you do not use in the end. 

What's the range of types of sensors that you do? 

Hubert van Doorne: In terms of applications, we have a couple of real main areas and the first one is absolutely by far present sensing and its presence and motion. So if someone is in front of a display, if he's approaching or moving across or where he is exactly standing that sort of application, but it's very much based on seeing where a person is and depending on where he or she stands, trigger the content or just for statistics, counting how many people are there.

And, the second, large area is what we call lift and learn. So if you pick up a product you can actually display information about this product over video, because we know which product’s being lifted. Typically we have about seven different technologies that can lift and learn. So we have a lot of different sensors for different products, but in the end, it is all for the same application of building a lift and learning.

Another bigger area is LED lighting which you use as guidance. So a third area that we do is, guidance where you really can guide people, for example, in a museum, where to look if you light up an exhibit, but it can also be in a cosmetic store. If you have different products and you make your selection on, for example, a tablet light up the products that match this selection. So LED lighting, it's not so much a sensor, it's more an actuator, but that's what we do a lot as well, and the fourth, biggest pillar is what we call UI elements and that's anything to do with, for example, normal push buttons, but it can also be air buttons so that you just hold your hand somewhere on a position very close to the screen and it already triggers so you don't have to really touch, air gesture that you can do with your hand in the air. That's all elements where you really want the user to do an interaction with the screen that is not on a touch screen and those elements, that's another important group of sensors. And then we have a lot of small, little special sensors. They're fun, but it's not the big chunk.

Did you find as you were growing the company that you started adding these things because people were asking about it or you just saw that people are struggling with understanding where to look next and so on… so let's use LEDs to light guide them? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both. Of course, we had already very early clients who helped us also. By asking the right things like, “Hey, this is something we could really use. So can you build something for us?” But also looking at ourselves, we have a very strong team, with a lot of ideas where they really look at what is needed now in the market and how we can find a technology that can really be well suited to do this and I think that's also a little bit where we differentiate ourselves from others. 

You do have great industry sensors. They are very expensive. They are very good but, for larger rollouts, and larger deployments, they are far too expensive to make a big rollout or too complex. Yeah, you have the cheap stuff, but in the end, it's also not something that can really scale because you cannot really adjust them exactly how you have to use them in mainly a retail environment, but also we see them now in more and other environments where if you use too many standard sensors then you cannot customize to how it should behave in that area and you can also get a lot of misreads and I think that's the strong point of our sensors that we really build something that you just connect and it works in that retail environment. 

A good example I always give is a presence sensor. We had a competition using exactly the same chipset from ST Microelectronics, but the fact that somebody walked in front of it and there was a minimum timing of a few milliseconds. A person should be there for half a second because otherwise a person cannot appear in half of a fraction of a second and be gone again but if you have a very fast sensor and you think, oh yeah, that was a person you also have to look at the application. It's not in a shopping center that somebody comes in and then a half second is gone again. So that must be a misread somewhere from the sensor, and that's how you very cleverly can filter how sensors should work, and I think that that's why we really make them for the, we call retail environment. That's our main application area, and if you want to use it in other areas there, it will work as well, but retail is just a very harsh environment where it should always work.

Are these devices that you're somewhat buying off the shelf, so to speak, or are you pretty much going down to the wood and designing these from scratch and sourcing the different components and maybe designing your own PCB and so on? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, it's a good question. All PCB design is completely done by ourselves, but the actual sensor is often a technology that we use. It's a standard chipset available from one of the big manufacturers like Sharp or anyone who makes real sensors for the industry where we take just the sensor chip part, put it on our own PCB, and really make it a solution that fits the digital signage market.  

So do you have contract manufacturing that makes this stuff over in Shenzhen or somewhere or are you doing that in the Netherlands? 

Hubert van Doorne: Some of our PCB manufacturing or most of our PCB manufacturing itself is done in China but we also have some clients who prefer the European stamp. So for some of the products, the PCBs are also made in Europe, and then end assembly and end-of-line testing are all done in the Netherlands. So that is where we really make the product and put all the software on and package it as a final product. 

If you look at the qualification, most of the products are really made in the Netherlands. It's not that we have a contract manufacturer somewhere in China who builds our complete box. We want to have that control at the end still in the Netherlands. 

Yeah. So you're definitely not just rebadging something that's made for the China market and client your own? 

Hubert van Doorne: No, absolutely not. For this, it would also be a little bit too complex. I have to say, of course, some accessories like cables or that sort of thing is of course, the standard stuff we sell, we do not make anything nonspecial ourselves, but all the sensor part controllers, everything that's, that's true, including if you look to the products, all the casings, everything is our own design.

You mentioned presence detection. Can you work with computer vision platforms and drive analytics, or is it very kind of basics, sensing the saying, “In an hour, these many people appear to be in front of the display?” 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, we do a little bit different than computer vision. I think honestly the computer vision guys are making great products. The only problem often is that you cannot put a camera or it's something that needs to be calibrated to the space. Typically our sensors are something that you can just drop in the space and it will start working and also on a different price point, but if you look, what we can provide is that we can see if there's someone in front of the sensor and we can measure the distance on a, like a centimeter-accurate. So we know it's a half inch where someone exactly stands and if she, for example, now moving towards display or moving away we get all this trigger data delivered to the digital signage player.

And with third parties, partners of ours, for example, you can have beautiful dashboards that can give you insights like, “This was the opportunity to see” and “So many people engaged with the product.” There you can see a complete dashboard exactly at that time of the day. It was busier because, in this area, more people were standing at that sort of statistics we could easily provide them. 

Yeah, for many years I have wondered about computer vision, the applicability for a lot of digital signage applications, this idea that you're going to serve content based on the demographic profile of who's in front of the screen.

It just didn't hit me as something that would ever be done very much, and I'm curious if your customers and partners generally find that, you know what, just having a sense of how many people the opportunity to see and so on is more than enough. We don't need to get that granular. We don't need to micro-target individual viewers.

Hubert van Doorne: I would say if you talk to the advertising companies, it's sort of the holy grail and they're all looking for the solution, and it's not that it's not coming, but it's also the question of how would you target your audience and I think that's something that’s being asked a lot, but if you see what is the technology needed for it, and if I see how far digital signage is now off still often, not even, if you see just in the store, like looping content, yeah, you could already be much more responsive than just looping content.

And that's also not being done. So before we leap into light years ahead of what we could do, and yes, technically we can do, but if, for example, already the advertisers have problems delivering the right content at the right time, this becomes something very, time-sensitive to really have it in an auction platform and very quickly delivered. So for sure, it's something where, slowly the whole advertising market will go, but I personally do not have the feeling that it will very quickly come into large deployments. 

Yeah. People are still freaked out about the idea of a camera being on them, even though there are cameras all over a store watching for security reasons.

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah. But it's also about how would you like to use it. I think showing content at the relevant position. There was once a client and this was many years ago, but it was about in-store materials and he was a manufacturer of cat food. So he says, “If somebody is in front of the shelf with all the cat food, that's the perfect moment to advertise because I know my customer is a cat owner, or at least someone who wants to feed the cat, and if he's male, female, and their age” and I think that's a very relevant thing. 

If you look into a store layout or for all the media advertising in the store if you know where the shoppers are already in the store, you can also tell a lot about what would be relevant content to show and that it's not only based on age demographics or demographics like male, female. I think that's something typically the advertisers do to slice the market and spice up the market. But I think there are different ways to do that in a very elegant way as well. 

Are you competing with touch or is it just another approach?

Hubert van Doorne: I think we work well together with touch even. I think we are hyper-focused on the sensor market, and that's the same, as what I say about computer vision. I think they make lovely products and also people who do mobile phone tracking, and it's a huge market of all kinds of inputs and sensors you can do and a lot of manufacturers have great touch screens, and I think what we do is just add another layer of possibilities of sensing something that can work well together. 

There's a bit of an orchestration to some of these experiences, right? if you have presence sensing, you can be 10 feet away and you might get one message if you're closer. If you move closer to a screen, it can trigger a different message and maybe guide them using the LED light bars and things like that. It seems to me I've seen demos of this when I've walked through your stand at shows like ISE. 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, that's definitely the presence sensor can just be to make something different than a looping video. I always say for the presence sensor, it’s the same as reading a book. I would like to start on page one, and if you want to tell a story to your customer, why are you starting somewhere in the middle? Because it's a looping video. You will never be synchronized. If somebody approaches the screen, it'll always be in the wrong spot.

And I think with a presence sensor, you can have a nice triggering content that really attracts the people to come close to the screen, and when they’re close and when they are in range, I would say you can start firing your message and have your story being told. A nice thing about the sensor is that you can actually time how long is the person standing in front. and is he watching the whole advert or is he halfway moving away? And that comes to another thing that you can very nicely do is, of course, the A/B testing. If you have different content, you can say, hey, with this content, just where the end is a little bit longer and a little bit more flashy, people stay six seconds longer, so this is better content to show.

So in that way, you can really optimize your content and your message by measuring how long people are looking and how can we improve. 

Now, if I'm a CMS software company, or a retail solutions company of some description, if I want to do that, am I having to write the software to create that experience, or is that somewhat templated or available within your end of the solution? 

Hubert van Doorne: That's a very good question. Technically we are a hardware provider. So the only thing we do is deliver the hardware that's capable of delivering triggers to the media player, and that can be over USB or over network or RS22 and we deliver that trigger message, and then you need a CMS that can actually really sense what to do with the trigger and there's absolutely no software from our side. It's just then the software of the CMS where you can, really in that UI setup like, for example, in a BrightSign, you have Bright Author, and then you can select from a list like, If sensor three is triggered, then I want to start video number five and when this is done, I want to have that started. So that's something that can be done via the CMS. 

I noticed on your website that you have three kinds of distinctions or tiers or whatever or partners. You've got full partners. You've got fully compatible and then partially compatible. What's the distinction between them? 

Hubert van Doorne: It's a very good one. We are still missing the official explanation on the website. So we'll add that over time, but no, maybe good to start with our partners that are really strong partners in the industry where we often exhibit together, we do trade shows together and we do projects together where we really team up and make something work for the integrator as a complete set. So that's our real industry partners. 

There are also a lot of CMSs that deliver a nice software solution, but in the end, we are not very closely working with them together, but the application works well and that's where we say it's a compatible CMS. So that means that all functionality will work, but we don't know that many details about the CMS. So if you want to know how our solution will work with that CMS, best to contact the CMS and they can tell you more about how the integration works because we cannot keep track of 50 different CMSs, how they all work, and how they all work in detail.

Lately, we added the partially compatible and that's the reason that we have a few that do a lovely integration on two or three of our sensors, and it's a very nice UI where you can set everything, but it's not working with every sensor. It's just, for example, our few popular sensors where it does work with, and they say yeah, but we can easily make a widget for this client and then it can work with any sensor, yeah, but it's not something that you can just connect and it just will work. So we say, with these companies, it does work, but for some specific centers. So please watch out and contact the company if you want to use it for this specific specific sensor, and ask them if it's working. So that's why we made these three different tiers.

These sensors are generally very small, and in a lot of cases, you would never even know they're there, right? 

Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. 

Is that by design, a necessity even? Or is it just that's the state of miniaturization where you can do that? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I would say the fact that you can make it very small is because it's retail, nobody wants to see tech. So the more you can hide it, the better it is, and yeah, I think we make quite a big effort to make the sensors as small as possible because they are much easier to integrate. So yeah, I think there are some options where you can have more bulky systems, but we always try to make them as small as possible.

I've spent quite a bit of time lately talking to different display manufacturers and R&D companies about emerging displays, and one of the things I talk about is with stuff like micro LED, there will be a time when you'll be able to include a sensor right within the display. So just because the pixels are so small, you could put a sensor device in there as well. So you're not just looking at a screen, you're also looking at something that can do some degree of sensing. 

Have you started to look at that at all, or is that just out there somewhere? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, we do see that, I think I can take a parallel to a couple of years ago. We were quite growing big in the room booking systems that we did little LED strips that you could add to the system and then you saw the first screens popping up where they had the little LED strips integrated, and we are not selling any LED strips anymore for booking. That's just where the industry goes. But I don't see that as a bad thing, because I think, for example, if Samsung decides to add a presence sensor in every one of their screens, then that's the next step where we say okay, then maybe our sales of single presence sensors will go down, but there are other sensors again, where you would like to measure again. 

So I think it's sort of the same as you see media players integrating into screens. If people are using it a lot, it makes sense to make it in one unit. I'm happy to see that everything gets less complex and is being integrated into one unit, and I think it's more our job to, for all those things that cannot go into super high volume, that there is space in every screen, then maybe you need a present sense or just looking at a different angle then right in front of the screen. That will be something that's never added to the screen. because it's a typical application. 

There are two components, right? There's the sensors and then there's controllers. How does that break down and do you need both? Obviously you need the sensors. 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, and you do need the controllers. What we did with our hardware structure is that we have a lot of sensors and they all come back to the same little connector. It's what we call Xtalk and it's like a mini USB, and that's actually every sensor can be hooked into any controller, and then the different controllers we have is just to oversee the whole system setup and to have one, yeah, let's say a sort of USB hub where you have one communication channel to the media player and our controller is then, really doing the power supply for all sensors, seeing what's connected and being the host the communicator to the media player. 

And we have different controls because for example, for something like LED lighting, you can get a controller with an LED driver already embedded on board, so it makes it much easier to control LED strips and the same for example for audio switching and we have a lot of different controllers that have different functionalities built in just to make it more easy and have it integrated in one system. 

How do you know if everything's behaving as it's supposed to? 

Hubert van Doorne: It's a good question. The nice thing is that our system, our controller is completely monitoring all sensors and the system integrator can also always see if all sensors are online even exact serial numbers and everything that's connected. 

It looks like very simple tech, but in the end, you can, within a dashboard, for example, completely monitor your system health and see even if somebody is plugging something in a different port. You can already see that the system's setup has changed. So that's how we can monitor and see if something is not working or needs attention over time. That's something that's really needed if you do large-scale rollouts, and I think, yeah, everything we build is just made for maintaining it or giving it a possibility to roll out in big volume.

Is that your device management dashboard, this is purely an API that you can integrate into a system integrator or whatever. 

Hubert van Doorne: It's just the API where we deliver that, and we have then our partners that can deliver you a complete dashboard already that you don't have to build something yourself, but if you have the as a system integrator, I want to build my own dashboard, you're free to use our API and you don't need any license. Then it's just free. You buy our hardware and there's no license cost. 

Is there an emerging kind of tech that you're now looking at that you think you can add to the stack or could be a big deal like lift and learn and presence sensing has been around for a very long time. People who've been in this industry and doing retail solutions understand it, but is there new stuff coming? 

Hubert van Doorne: Not so much on the sensor part. For example, last year, we added weight sensors also for lift and learning so it's a completely different technology. Radar technologies are improving. So yes, we always continuously monitor what's available and there will be new additions, but I think that will not be complete wow in the industry now there is the Holy Grail that this is possible. It will be just additions over time. 

What we do see is that there is a very strong appetite for green signage products and what we will do is next year we will launch a new product in that area so that we can also deliver to more verticals than only the retail and experiences as we become more and more interested in other verticals. 

I was curious about digital signage. If you work in the industry, you think it's quite a big industry, but in relative terms, it's quite small and narrow. Is there enough of a business for you just within digital signage, or is it important to branch out? 

Hubert van Doorne: No, I think it's definitely big enough for digital signage now because there's almost hardly any competition. I always say our biggest competitor is no sensor. So in a project somewhere that the sensor is being skipped, but, it is fast growing and I think digital signage itself is growing, but I think also you see much more areas where it becomes, yeah, it's a discussion, is it digital signage or, it's a screen somewhere in an area, if you call it digital signage or not, we see more and more screens coming up and more and more data becoming available in the digital world. 

So I think, yes, the number of screens will be quite growing in the next few years and I think, there's a very big market we can service. 

Yeah, I've written a number of times and talked to, or when I've done talks with companies, about what I call boring signage and the idea of using sensors that maybe you would think about for parking garages and available stalls and so on, and using that in airports for very busy restrooms and things like that to have displays out front that kind of give you the state of availability of that. 

It sounds dumb, but I think it's incredibly valuable and again, it's just applying sensors in a creative way. 

Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yeah, and we see regularly that our sensors are being used in completely different order verticals. So your toilet example is one where they used our sensors, and even to see if the bin is full in the restroom. So it's not that we are not able to provide those markets. It's only that we communicate and we read the development for the retail space. 

But yeah, you will see more and more areas opening up where it becomes interesting and, that's something we definitely can branch out of, over, over time as well. For the moment, we are really focused on the retail space because I think there's a lot to win still, but yeah, the sensor technology will go not to retail or experience centers only. 

Retail gives you scale too that you don't necessarily get with washroom solutions. 

Hubert van Doorne: No, and I think very important is that, in the retail space, data is hugely important for AI to see. How can I do my shopper assortment? How can I see how people are behaving in the store? And actually by providing the sensors that can really measure. 

We have, for example, now a retailer in the UK that's only using the sensors to see how people are moving in front of the shelf. There's not even digital signage anymore, and I think, that gives the importance of knowing what people are doing, that they want to deploy a system in more than a hundred stores to measure to just see how they can improve and make better operation.

You're in Eindhoven? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, that's right. 

How big is the company at this point? 

Hubert van Doorne: At this point, we are only a very small group. We are around 25 staff and now slowly growing our sales team as we see the market really starting to develop before it was a lot of interest and smaller projects and sometimes a bigger rollout of 500 stores or something, but now you really see, since last year volume coming in and that's really nice that we can now scale and now we are really from the sometime away from the startup and now a scale-up. So that's also where it will happen with the staff in the same way. 

You mentioned being involved with another company back in 2015? Are you completely a private company or do you have ties to a larger firm? 

Hubert van Doorne: No, it's a completely privately owned company. At that time, we were part of a display company, but that one stopped in business and this was completely carved out as an individual company and it's completely independently operating.

If people want to find out more, they get you on nexomsphere.com?

Hubert van Doorne: Yes, that's the perfect place to start, and if there's any question, please reach out to one of our team members or the emails. We are like not all companies always, but we are responsive to our emails, and we like to help people with any question they have because that's the first step in exploring what sensors can do.

You're at ISE, right? 

Hubert van Doorne: Of course, and that will be really exciting with some new products. You should not miss as an integrator, even if you're not interested in the retail space. So I would definitely see common visitors. 

All right. Thank you for spending some time with me. 

Hubert van Doorne: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Have a great day.

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

There are not a lot of companies that have been involved in what we now call digital signage for 44 years, but Videotel has been selling technology that puts marketing information on screens since 1980.

The company started with VCRs (younger readers may have to Google that) and then started designing, manufacturing and selling DVD players that, unlike consumer devices, would happily play out a set of repeating video files for weeks, months and years. Back in the days before fast internet connections, cloud computing and small form factor PCs, that's how a lot of what we now know as digital signage was done.

About 14 years ago, the San Diego-area company added dedicated, solid state digital signage media players - and that product line has steadily grown to include networked and interactive versions. The company also now has interactive accessories for stuff like lift and learn, and directional speakers that help drive experiences in everything from retail to museums.

I had a good conversation with Lisa Schneider, who runs sales and marketing, and Travis McMahand, Videotel's CTO. We get into the company's roots, the evolution to solid state media players, and how Videotel successfully competes with $400 and higher players, when at least part of the buyer market seems driven mostly by finding devices that are less than $100.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what Videotel is all about? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having both Travis and me today. We appreciate it. My name is Lisa Schneider and I am the executive vice president for sales and marketing for our company, Videotel Digital.

We were founded in 1980. Gosh, it's been almost 44 years now, back when we were manufacturing top-loading VCRs, that went into industrial-grade DVD players, and now in the last 14 years, we are manufacturing digital signage media players. We have interactive solutions that include various sensors like motion sensors, proximity sensors, and weight sensors. We've got mechanical LED push buttons and touchless IR buttons and RFID tags, and things like that that create interactive displays. We also provide directional audio speakers. We have various form factors for all types of projects, and then we also have Travis on the line with us. I'll let Travis introduce himself. 

Travis McMahand: Oh, hi, I'm Travis McMahand I am the CTO of Videotel Digital. 

Where's the company based? Is it in San Diego? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, we are in, it's San Diego. It's actually Chula Vista, borderline San Diego. So in California. 

San Diego area. 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, San Diego area. Beautiful San Diego. 

So I've been aware of your company forever and going all the way back to the days when you were doing industrial grade, commercially oriented DVD players. In the early days of digital science before things were networked, that's what people were using and if you used a regular DVD player or even a VCR or something like that, the thing was really not set up to play over and over again if you were using just like a consumer-grade device.

So the whole idea was you were, you guys developed commercial-grade versions that were rated to last, for days, weeks, months, years. Is that accurate? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, that is accurate, and it was, that was our flagship product back in the day. That was because we made a truly industrial-grade player and it would auto power on, auto seamlessly loop and repeat without any manual interaction, even without a remote. So it was a looping player. 

We actually still have three different types of industrial-grade DVD players that we still offer. They're actually really popular in healthcare facilities because they are specifically UL-approved for medical DVD players still, and they are still out there and, we are still producing them. 

The attraction for that at the time was that just the absence of really networked media players unless you were quite sophisticated and were using big box PCs and everything else, I assume that market with the exception of what you’re saying about Hospitals is largely gone away?

Lisa Schneider: It hasn't been, for example, like sometimes with waiting rooms, people are still using DVDs for movies, for entertainment purposes, not just in healthcare. Sometimes there are still people who are self-burned content for museums. It's just simple for them to just throw the disc in and then they walk away and it just continuously loops. So they're still out there. 

It's not completely gone away and we are one of the only ones left though that is still really providing the industrial grade DVD players.

You said about 14 years ago, you got into digital signage media players that were not based on DVDs, it was based on hard drives or solid-state storage.

Lisa Schneider: Yes, we started with solid state media players that were just simply looping off of an SD card or USB, no network connection, none of the fancy stuff, and that was really kind of the migration from the DVD, because people didn't want to use DVDs anymore. They just wanted to upload their content, do the same thing, load them, and go.

So we probably still have a few versions of just solid-state players. That's how we entered the market. But one of the really cool things we did was we made one of them interactive, which, that's where we come into the interactive solutions, which we can talk about too. 

The primary products that you have now are network-connected, right?

Lisa Schneider: We have both. We still have solid-state digital signage players, for those simple needs, and then we do have networked players as well. 

I'm thinking there's an awful lot of cases like retail marketing for brands for product launches and things like that, where, yes, you could use a network digital signage player, but it's loading up a set of files at the start and that's really all it's ever going to use, right? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's a lot of the use cases, where they just want to upload the content and let it go but there are obviously use cases where the content is ever-changing and they can push out content on our remote players, network players, via quick push.

Do you have device management? Will you know what's going on with these devices, as they're out in a big box or whatever? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, one of our new player, we actually just did a press release on it for our VP92 4K network player. It will allow customers to use our free embedded software on the player that will allow them to push out the content remotely and that they can see what is being played in the various locations, wherever the box is deployed to, and then if it's just a single unit or hundreds of units if it's up in the thousands, then we recommend our cloud-based CMS software where they can manage, do all the management within the software itself.

So you have your own software, but I'm assuming you're not selling yourself as a software company? 

Lisa Schneider: No, we are not selling ourselves as a software company. We have hardware and then we have various software options. But it is embedded in the players to make it extremely simple to use.

And it's tuned specifically for your devices. 

Lisa Schneider: Correct. Yes. 

Can a third-party CMS company, a CMS software company use your boxes? 

Lisa Schneider: Travis that might be a good question for you to answer. 

Travis McMahand: That's a possibility. We design our players to be simple and reliable. We don't make it so difficult to set up a program, so in doing that, we've hidden or disabled, certain features within the operating system. But we can still work with companies if they have a specific application or service that they want to use. We can definitely work with companies to try to make that happen. 

Okay, so I guess a scenario would be something like a retailer or even a brand that has networks in stores and is using a CMS for the big displays for retail marketing and they say, we would like to use your stuff for the interactive or whatever, can we use the same platform to manage both of them?

Travis McMahand: Yeah, that's a possibility. It goes on a case-by-case basis. 

It's not something you're actively marketing, but technically you could do it if it makes sense for both sides, right? 

Lisa Schneider: Absolutely, Dave. That's what I'd like to interject. We're open to those conversations with anybody who is interested, especially if it is a larger project is something I would entertain. 

The hardware sector has been a tough one for a lot of the companies that have media players, with maybe the notable exception of BrightSign, which has a very big footprint everywhere, but the PC guys in particular, struggled to, in recent years, get relevance, and a lot of that seems to be driven by a race to the bottom to see how low we can go in terms of cost for a media player, and we now have Amazon with a custom build or kind of a stripped-out build of its Fire Sticks that are $99. 

Has it been a challenge to compete with that stuff or, do you operate differently or have a different market?

Lisa Schneider: That's a great question, and yes, I did see that new Amazon $99 Fire Stick. But we're very unique in a sense where, sure you can purchase a $99 player, but is it really industrial grade? Is it going to seamlessly auto-loop? Is it reliable? Can you connect interactive devices to it? Can you grow within it? 

So it is a challenge in some aspects of it. But it seems that the ones that go, the customers that choose that route, end up circling back and they want more. It wasn't enough. The price was good, but then they realized, if we invest a little bit more, we're getting all of these things that we can grow into.

And your media playout boxes, they look like they're industrial grade, ruggedized. They've got what looks like heat sinks or things like that built into it. Are these designs done in Chula Vista and then you have contracts manufacturer over in Asia? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, spot on.

We design our own players in-house, and then we have them made, and we have a stringent process and a bunch of design engineers that are just constantly trying to break things, and they do a really good job of it, and we are very careful as to what we put out in the market and that is what also makes us unique. 

And that allows you to sell at a higher price point because you have people looking at it and going, okay, I get why I'm paying more for this. 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, absolutely. We're not just relabeling some cheapo boxes. This is something that is designed in-house and these are the features, and we are able to get a little bit more because we are using premium parts during the manufacturing process and other other reasons as well, not just for the hardware.

Travis, is it your own operating system or are you running on some kind of flavor of Linux? 

Travis McMahand: The base operating system is Android. We use Android and just build off of that, build our apps within it, and set up all of the settings exactly the way we want. 

 Has that been that from the start or did you evolve into Android?

Travis McMahand: Oh, we evolved into Android. We originally started when we first were doing players that were playing content just from USB and SD cards. It was really simple at that point and we were doing our own operating system. embedded operating system within the player at that point. 

But then when we wanted to start adding more features and opening up the platform to more types of files, we found that using an Android-based operating system was much easier and more reliable to get going. 

When I look at your customer list, it's impressive. You've got a whole bunch of interesting customers, a lot of them appear to be attractions, museums, that sort of thing, some brands, and so on.

How would you describe, Lisa, your core customer base? 

Lisa Schneider: I would say our core customer base is going to be in the retail space, museums, trade shows and events, and probably hotels, if I had to go down the list, but, we have just about everybody from food and beverage to restaurants, people use our players for menu boards, a lot of kiosks. We do healthcare, dentist offices, med spas, we're into transit on buses and bus stations. Just like the list goes on, but I would say those would probably be our top. 

Because you have these ruggedized boxes, is it advantageous that you are in the San Diego area as opposed to on the other side of the Pacific in terms of, there are companies that also sell small form factor, ruggedized media, and play-out boxes that are in Taiwan or China. But the challenge you sometimes have is the time zones and language. 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we make it known that we are in the States, obviously we wanted to serve the US, but also we can maintain and manage the international business as well. But yeah, it's just was like just evolved in that way. 

You sell direct or do you have channels and distribution? 

Lisa Schneider: Great question. We do both. We sell directly more to the small business owners, and then most of our business is through integrators and the reseller channel.

Why did they come your way? We covered it, but I'm still curious about the pitch when you get asked, why you? 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, why Videotel? We've been around for 44 years, and we have experience. One of the big things is we really do listen to our customers. The word gets out, we offer free customer support and free technical support. You get a live person on the phone. Our customers are constantly, it's funny how they say, gosh, thank you for calling me back. It’s “does so and so not call you back?” So they love us for those reasons and that we do offer industrial-grade equipment. It lasts and thank goodness the rumor is out there that we make solid products. 

I'm also curious about how you get the manufacturing done. Do you have somebody located in China or wherever it is? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, we do.

We have a team of people that are in China that we've actually had relationships for, gosh, I think 15 years now and so it's a very solid relationship. It makes it so much easier to communicate, and then they're the interface to all of the manufacturing that goes on. So there's our front lines there and it makes it a lot easier for us.

Are your deployments, I guess they're not your deployments, but the projects that are done, do they tend to be small quantities and a lot of different customers or do you have accounts where they may have hundreds or even thousands of your units because they're all over the place? 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah I would say probably 70% of our business is the small to mid-sized business and then the other 30% is where you're going to find the more enterprise larger on the upward of a thousand projects. 

As a biz dev person when you have a whole cavalcade of smaller customers that gets to be a challenge to manage, right?

Lisa Schneider: It can be, but this is what makes life a lot easier for us as a team here is that our products are so easy to use that they are plug-and-play. They can figure it out. We have a whole learning program, a bunch of videos on our website, examples, and things. We have a chat, so it flows nicely. It really does. 

It hasn't been too much of a burden because I think we just make things that are simple. That's what we pride ourselves on. 

So I go directly to you, I'm a museum, and I need three of these things for looping videos. I order them, and you ship them to me, what do I need to do to get them running? 

Lisa Schneider: You need to simply connect it to your HDMI to any of the screens that you're using, and then you upload the content on the USB SD and then you insert it and it will play or if you're using the network capabilities, same thing, you plug it in, you get your network connection and then depending on if you're using the free embedded software, It's a matter of just opening up the software on the player and choosing the source that you want to use. If it's, let's say USB SD, if you want to use SFTP or LAN, you can point your content to a URL, but it's basic clicking of a button and uploading your file, it's just that simple.

So if you want to get fancy, you can, and use file transfers and everything else, but, if IT is not your role, but you just need to get something running, you don't need to bring somebody in to help you. 

Lisa Schneider: That is exactly right. In fact, I always tell people, I say, you do not need a computer science or an IT degree to run our stuff. So you get it, take it out of the box, plug and play, and you're really ready to go. 

If it's networked, wre you getting questions about security these days? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, I think we have. Not too many, but Travis would be better suited to answer that. He handles that side of that. 

Travis McMahand: Yeah, for security, we really try to lock down the player to make it so that it really doesn't have any incoming ports to it. So you can't log directly into the player over a network. The only settings that you can do on the player itself are done with either the infrared remote control that comes with the player, or you can connect a keyboard and mouse to our network players to access the menu that way.

But for the sources, say you're using a shared LAN folder or an SFTP site, you're putting your content on one of those sources, and then you're just pointing the player to that source and telling it, okay, go check for new content or check for changed content every hour or every day or whatever. So the player itself goes out and checks for the content. There's no inbound traffic to the player that the player doesn't initiate, 

Gotcha, and I gather from the IT and IS crowd lately that whereas several years ago they were pretty jumpy about using Android, they're now pretty comfy with it. 

Travis McMahand: Yeah, I haven't heard too many complaints about it being an Android player. Once we explained the security that we have built into the player, we really haven't had any pushback on that. 

Let's talk about interactive. Why did you go down that path? Was it customer demand? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes. You know what? It actually was. It started with a museum actually in San Diego and they came to us and they said, this is what we're looking for. We want to trigger content and this is how we want to do it, and we thought, okay, we'll give it a shot, and then it just bloomed from there. 

Once we came up with a way of connecting and how we're gonna create the interaction, then we started evolving from there with all the different types of interactive sources.

You also have interactive devices that are paired with your playout boxes. Was that a kind of a learned decision that you're best to develop your own as opposed to trying to integrate other stuff that may be used for other purposes and could maybe be hacked to work with this?

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, I think that the reason we just did it in the house was because we wanted to control it, and also really because everything was just out was so complex. We're like, okay, we need to just bring this down 10 notches. Let's just, we need to make the super simple for our customers. So then that's why we just developed it in-house. 

Yeah, in my dark past, I worked with a company that did digital signage solutions and had its own media players, and I remember there was an ask for interactive, and we had to source big ass buttons from a company that made buttons for slot machines, and then we had a guy who worked out of a, I think a motorhome somewhere in California and designed controller boards. So we had a custom controller board for this thing and everything else and it worked, but good God, that was a process as opposed to just saying, “Yeah, I want this play-out box and, I need two of these, and two of those interactive things.” 

Lisa Schneider: Oh, that's pretty much how it went down with us too. And our team really loves the challenge. We love doing custom work. I know Travis is working on a bunch of stuff right now with different projects. We have one that is using our interactive IP push, is what we call it, for the automotive parts department actually, and I can't say who just yet, but, it's a customer that just reported back that with our solution that we created, this was the first time in the history of their company they had the highest productivity. 

Again, it comes from the customers. That's what I mean. When I say we listen to our customers, they help you grow, 

When I look at the different accessories that you have, there's motion sensors, there's triggers and buttons and things like that. What typically are your customers using? 

Lisa Schneider: I would say the most popular would be the LED push buttons and/or the IR touchless buttons for museums, also in the trade show booths, I would say our sense solution, is our motion sensor that kind of detects human distance from a display. So you can lure somebody into something and then it would trigger the content once they're in within a certain range. I would say that was probably our two most popular solutions. 

We also have a sensor that's a wave to-play where you just wave your hand over an area and it will trigger content. That's another popular one too.

I've always wondered about some of those things because if there's any sort of a learning curve, like you, you've got to get somebody to wave to change a file or whatever that is, how hard is it for them to figure that out? Even though it sounds simple. 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we do. We make suggestions for, God, the stuff that some of these integrators come up with is so cool, but they do make it really simple, using decal stickers or there it's on plywood or it says, wave your hand here, or it's within the content itself. So they come up to the screen. It's pretty pretty self-explanatory. 

We're not one of those where it's going to tell you your age, your hair color and eye color and anything to that degree. This is more simple. We don't find too many people standing there lost looking at it, thank goodness. 

Are many using the capabilities to lift and learn? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's one of our newer solutions that we just came out with, really cool, lifting a product off of a display and then it triggering. Retailers are really taking to that right now as well as the museums, where you have to physically hold something, lift it. 

Yeah. It's interesting because that's something that's an idea, a concept, and a capability that has been around for 10-15 years. So when I've seen companies saying, look, we can do lift and learn. I'm thinking, okay, you didn't exactly discover fire. It's been around, but it really didn't have much marketplace adoption until now, it seems, recently. 

Lisa Schneider: It is, but the lift and learns that was out there before were again, so complex and we take it down a notch and it's just a matter of making a harness, they plug it in the back of the player, plug it in the TV and you name your files a certain way and they're good to go.

So yeah, we're not reinventing anything, but. We have made it so simple to use that you don't need that, to a degree to figure it out. 

When you talk to prospects and they ask about your company and everything, is there a reference customer, or a project that you tend to trot out and say, here's a great example of what we do?

Lisa Schneider: Yes, there are so many. We're lucky enough to have a whole plethora on our website of case studies that have participated in that. So if I say yes, if it's a museum, I say, okay, I have a link to a laundry list of museums, and here's what we did for them. They shared their photos and how they did it. So yes, we absolutely can do that. 

All right, this has been great. It's terrific to finally have a chat with you guys and find out more about your company. Thanks for spending some time with me 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. It's always so good to chat with you. 

Travis McMahand: Yeah. Thank you

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

One of the particularly interesting things about Outform is how a company that's been doing digital in retail for 20-plus years is not all that well known in digital signage circles.

Not that it's hurt the Miami-based company, which has offices and manufacturing facilities all over the world, and has delivered countless tech-centered shopper engagement solutions for some of the world's biggest brands.

I'd been operating mostly with the impression that Outform designed nice-looking digital fixtures for retail, but there is a lot more to the company than that. They do the whole nine yards of retail from idea through execution.

I had a great chat that could have gone on for a few hours with Outform founder Ariel Haroush. We started with the company's roots and how Haroush kind of fell into scalable digital solutions for retail. We get into how the company works and the state of things like retail media.

Then we spend quite a bit of time talking about Haroush's ambitious new venture, called Future Stores. It takes the notion of pop-up stores, and gives it the scale and digital experience demanded by big global brands. The first location opens in central London on October 30th.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Ariel, thanks for joining me. For those who don't know, can you give a rundown of what Outform does and their background? 

Ariel Haroush: Outform is a retail marketing company in essence. We've been referred to as an innovation agency because we are very much on the cutting edge of retail, experiential, and innovation in retail. The company does everything from design all the way to execution, which is quite unique because we have the ability to ideate and strategize like a typical agency that you would expect. But we are transitioning seamlessly into the execution room. So everything we ideate, we engineer, we prototype and we manufacture.

So while the business has a very, I would say appeal of an agency, we are, in essence, a manufacturer at scale, and we have manufacturing facilities all over the world in three main regions in Europe, in Asia, and in the States alone, we have two manufacturing facilities, both in Chicago and in San Francisco.

Did you start as a manufacturer and evolve into an agency or vice versa, or none of the above? 

Ariel Haroush: My journey as the founder of Outform was quite unique. My passion for the industry actually started when I watched the movie Back to the Future. I'm sure you remember Marty flying all the way to the future with the DeLorean and then you see this billboard transform into a shark, and I was just mesmerized by it, and there's something in it that made me say, “oh my God, this is what I want to do.” 

So when I started my career, I was always very much leaning to the visual aspect of things. I had an office in Times Square and I was looking at all the signage there and I went, geez, why no one is doing it on a commercial level, and that was the seed of founding Outform. So I started really with no manufacturing background, but with a lot of passion towards how spectacular signage should be, and I was able to convince one customer to give me an opportunity. Back in the days it was Siemens and I had done this huge mobile phone replicas in, one of the biggest trade shows called CeBIT and that was an experience, and one thing led to another, the second customer was Samsung, and I was moving from one customer to another, creating those experiences. 

As things evolved, one of the biggest opportunities that I've got was a customer, in the United States, in Chicago that said, “Hey, are you doing all this massive, spectacular signage. Would you mind doing something smaller in scale?” I said what do you mean by that? He said, we don't need giant signage. We need something that we can fit into a retail store, and I said, okay, what do you have in mind? He said, I need 20 mobile phone replicas in a size of, not bigger than a meter or three feet. And I said, gee, that sounds like a lot of units, and back in the days I used to do those things in the Philippines, and he called me about two weeks later and he said oh, by the way, it's not 10 units, it's 500, and I was like, what? So the factory owner in the Philippines said, “Hey Ariel, we cannot do 500.” I said, so what do I need to do? He said, you need to fly to China and look for someone to do injection tools for molds. 

So I took my backpack and I went into China and the guy called me again and said, it's not 500. It's actually 2000, and I'm like, what's going on? I discovered retail in essence and the scale that you have within retail. That time was actually the launch of the Razor phone. I don't know if you remember that Motorola phone. It was a massive success. I've done, in a period of about, I think it was 12 months, I did 70,000 units that went to every single store globally, because there was just a smart way of how we design it, in a way like it's cutting the ceiling or the wall or the floor. So you just apply it, and it seems like the phone is so sharp that it's cutting whatever surface you place it on. So everyone wanted to have it, and then, I realized retail is where the scale is, and the manufacturing aspect of it is what gives the business model way more substance.

So with that in mind, I started to invest in factories, and one thing led to another, and I started to get into a place that, we're now buying factories, and we started to scale the business from there, and here I am today with more than a thousand people at Outform in various regions, doing what I enjoy the most, which is shaping the future of retail.

Wow. Maybe there's not a when moment, but, I'm curious how you evolved into doing the agency ideation through the execution side of it as you did these things, you realized, the best people to actually manage this and deploy it and so on are my own people as opposed to trying to sub this out?

Ariel Haroush: Part of the journey of working with customers, I worked with a very big tech company in Cupertino and you can guess who, and they were so secretive about everything, and we could not outsource anything in terms of the thinking side of things, and I just needed to bring people in house and I always had a tendency to creative, and I was very involved in that side and one person and then another person, and then you find yourself with a creative team and you start to conceptualize and bring in ideas, and because a lot of the stuff that we do had a highly fused tech integration, we started to create our own kind of R&D team to deal with those things.

Many times I face situations where clients come to me and say, " Oh, my agency created this and they could not deliver on that, and we are super disappointed how we can ensure that it's not going to happen with you guys”, and that's always been a differentiator because everything we design we actually do. So we just start building up on those experiences, and one of the things as I built the company that I never really liked when customers or people refer to us as the vendor because the vendor is something very, in essence, commoditized type of a description, right? But I really enjoyed it when I was a partner or an agency, and I invested heavily in that because I felt this is where we create value, and every time I had a conversation with clients, which was on the C-level. It was more about how we can win in retail. It wasn't about how we're going to make it exactly, and what's the engineering and how many screws and the thickness of the material and all that good stuff, it was more about how we can influence the shopper?

That's always been the passion. So investing heavily into that, and that was a differentiator for Outfrom, because, in essence, if you think about the industry in a nutshell, and you ask yourself why advertising agencies became so big as they grew, like the Ogilvy, the Y&R, the Saatchi & Saatchi, they had a really unique business model. They competed heavily on the pitch, right? And they put everything in front of it. Design, planners, strategy, and once they win the pitch, in essence, the reward was the media buying. So if you compete on a Coke pitch, you know that they're going to spend 300 million on advertising, which you buy media on and you're getting a commission on that. So that was the scalable business model. 

For Outform, it's been the manufacturing side of it. That's the scalable part, but you have to put all the upfront investments to have a seat at the table, and to me, that was a model to replicate. When I look at our industry, it was very fragmented to mostly moms and pops type of operation, and they always looked at it in terms of, “I'm a manufacturer. Tell me what you need to do, and I'll make it for you.” 

But that's not really the conversation customers want to have. They want to know how they can best win in retail, and they come into those experts to help them craft the proposition, and when you think about our industry, as it's getting more and more technology fused, you have to rely on people that understand the different disciplines in terms of manufacturing. So it's not just cutting wood or bending metal or using plastic. It's a combination of all of the above, including tech, including data, including how you can learn and optimize your offering as you move forward. So there's just so much built into that, and Outform was very eager to play in that area.

Yeah, I've certainly through the years seen no end of companies who manufacture things. They've invented something and they're very proud of their features and specs surrounding that thing, but they go in selling that thing as opposed to, as you were describing, talking about the objective and selling a solution and providing a solution and you can see how the industry has evolved that way and how more and more, particularly large clients who are saying, I don't want to cherry pick all the components that I need for this thing. I want a partner who's going to help me hold my hand through this whole thing and execute it and, be cohesive as opposed to, ending up with a lot of finger pointing when there's a problem. 

Ariel Haroush: Exactly, and if you think about it, every customer has different types of challenges. When you look at the likes of Google, and they need to educate the customers about what Google Home is all about. That's one type of challenge, and when you look at Estee Lauder trying to maximize the shelf efficiencies, that's a different type of challenge.

You also many times find yourself depending on where you actually have been deployed, the mindset of the shopper from a Home Depot to a Best Buy is completely different. When you're in Home Depot, you want to know how easy it is and how much time it'll take to install. When you're in Best Buy, you want to know the technical specs and the mindset really shifts between the retailers that you're in. So the emphasis on how you maximize the conversion is different. There's just so many opportunities. Of engaging and I'm not even going and discussing the Gen Z behavior and shift in behavior that's really challenging a lot of retailers and a lot of brands, because if you think about it, the type of consumers that we have, the call it the shoppers of tomorrow, they're so different in mindset.

I always like to give the examples that I have five kids by the way, my oldest one is 16 and we're driving in Miami and he said, “Hey, dad, can you change the song?” And I'm looking at him and say, it's the radio. You can change it, and he's giving me this weird look. He said, what do you mean by changing the song? I said, you can't do this on radio. He said I don't get it. So what if you don't like the song? I said, you wait, and he said, if you don't like the next one, I said, you wait. I said, dad, it makes no sense, and he's right because he's using Spotify. It makes no sense. 

You got to get him a rotary dial telephone.

Ariel Haroush: Amen. Amen. So we are talking about a different type of shoppers and those shoppers, if you look at the attention span generally of Gen Z compared to millennials, compared to baby boomers. I just see my kids, I would say that their attention span is on the length of a TikTok story.

They're instantly getting bored, and man, it's a science. How do you get them not to flip this TikTok story or the Instagram story? And you're trying to make sense of it and to understand what actually captured their attention, and if you're in a retail environment, that's not different than your TikTok story moments, right? You have so many offerings, and you need to make sure that the shopper is actually giving attention so you can tell your story so you can potentially convert. This is what we're dealing with, and we have to be super efficient in the way we are crafting the proposition to our clients.

So who are your typical customers or Outform’s typical customers? I'm guessing it's much more brands than retailers themselves. 

Ariel Haroush: It's a combination of both actually. We're working with many brands. We've been super active for the past 20 years dealing with the brands because in essence, they need to deploy whatever they do and not only one retailer, but multiple retailers, and we need to do it on a global basis. So the challenge around it, it's quite enormous, and we've been excelling in that landscape, but we also have a lot of retailers coming to us. 

We realize that we as well need to change, and if we're not going to change, we're going to end up like the Sears and the other retailers that went under, so what do we need to do? And you can start seeing a shift in the way retailers are operating. They used to be super passive, by the way. They’d say, “We shouldn't worry. The brand will figure that out.” But the brand also realized that they can get sales online. So the retailers now need to start asking, “Am I just a showroom type of a facility? No, I need to add more value.” 

So how do you do that and what's the proposition for the shoppers? So everyone is challenged around what's the future of retail. 

Yeah, that's interesting because I've heard endlessly for years and had some experience myself that retailers are interested in the digital stuff and experiential and everything else, but they want the brands to put it in and they want the brands to pay for it.

As Chris Riegel for Stratacash says, “They're like T Rex's, very large, but very short arms.” 

Ariel Haroush: You're right, but there is a shift here because if you look at Best Buy as an example, they're realizing that a big component of the revenue is coming right now from what you refer to as retail media, which is an online terminology. If you want to get good placement on the Best Buy website, you're paying for it, and there is a big revenue contribution to their bottom line coming from that. So everyone understands that retail media is on a meteoric rise. 

Now, the retailers are looking at it, so if I can generate this amount of income from my website, wait a minute, I have all this fleet of stores that can generate revenue for me and that's an opportunity that I don't necessarily want to give away to the brands. So we started to see a tremendous amount of conversations happening around how we can utilize our stores as a component of the retail media. So you're going to see a shift in terms of how retail is starting to look into it and say, there is an opportunity and untapped opportunity that we want to materialize on.

Are a lot of retailers over excited about retail media because they see the big numbers, but that they maybe don't understand that 99% of that dollar figure is going to mobile and online and not a hell of a lot of it goes into in store display. 

Ariel Haroush: The online numbers are staggering, right? I think by 2027, it's going to be as big as social media. So it's just huge. Now people ask: will the retail media in real life will be the next big thing? Now it's really a matter of eyeballs and a matter of conversion. Because all you're really getting when you are putting it online, you're getting X amount of eyeballs that are able to be converted and the percentage of conversion is actually a lead to sales and that's why it's such a hype right now. 

But if you get X amount of millions of people passing through your store and brands are competing in your stores on conversion, they are willing to be the one spending money on getting those eyeballs. You basically just got yourself a new revenue stream. Now one should ask whether the traditional retailer just being transactional is the future, because in essence, we are living in a place. It used to be called Omnichannel, right? Omnichannel, for the listeners here, I’ll use the analogyof a highway. Think about the highway with different lanes and every lane represents the different side of the Omnichannel. But we all drive today and we are crossing lanes all the time. So in essence, Omnichannel is no longer the right way of phrasing it, I call it more of a unified commerce because you can walk in the store, but you are with your phone, so you are constantly connected and you can compare prices on your phone in the store, and you can make a decision to click the button on your phone And it's gonna wait for you on your doorstep. 

So what is an Omnichannel anymore? It's more unified commerce and in a world of unified commerce It doesn't matter where the purchase actually happens. So yes, you have your stores because you need to have a presence. It's almost like a business card of your brand. But in essence, the metrics of how much I'm selling in the store should not be the most applicable way of doing your KPIs if you get a halo effect that happening outside of the store, it doesn't matter. It's a unified conference. 

So where are you at with the company now with Outform? Because you started this new entity that I want to talk about called Future Stores. 

When we chatted, oh God, back in the spring or something like that, you had mentioned that this thing was coming and that you were continuing to be the CEO of Outform, but maybe perhaps winding that down.

Ariel Haroush: No, Outform is my true love. It's a company I founded. I enjoy every moment of it because every day is a new day. But when I see what's the future of retail and when I'm asking myself, and this is something I've always been extremely passionate about, one of the things that I've seen time and time again, that many times we work with the brands and we're doing something, it doesn't really get the big bang that we all hope for, and I ask myself why.

If you want to do, for example, a pop up, and let's say you want to do a pop up because you want to tell the story, and you have a product to launch. By the time you're designing the pop up, you need to design it, you need to engineer it, you need to prototype it, you need to spend three to four months and then you need to find a location that you can actually host, but the landlords are not waiting for you. So securing a location six months in advance is super difficult. So many times we do all this effort and we end up compromising and we find ourselves in a shopping mall, and there's so much work, sweat and tears built into that, that when you're actually launching it, you don't get the big bang that you expect.

And to me, that was always a missed opportunity, and every investment was one off, and if you do something which is very analog driven and things change, context change, the market change, competitive landscape change, you're not unable to react. So to me, I felt there must be a better solution, and when I look at the high street, it doesn't matter where you go, whether you're in 5th Avenue, Oxford streets, Champs-Élysées, Ginza in Tokyo, in essence, you're seeing the same old brands time and time again, and you've seen Zara in one location, you've seen them probably in every location, so nothing really drives you to step inside, which is a real shame.

I ask, given everything we spoke about that TikTok story mentality, I said, what if the high street can be as dynamic as our social feed and I had this vision of creating a space that can be almost like the sphere in Vegas for retail, that is fully immersive and brands can come in without the worrying of engineering and prototyping and manufacturing and finding the spot, they actually know the size and they get the best location ever because it's one of those high street flagship locations and everything is digitized and everything is immersive and they get the big bang for their investment. I said, wow, that's actually something if you're going back to the Marty moment, flying to the future, that's the moment for me where the billboard becomes a shark, where you notice something and you can not miss it.

That's really the thesis behind Future Stores. Those futures stores are set on prime locations. We're talking about the best of the best. Oxford Street, 5th Avenue, where brands can do global activations in multi-cities at the same time without all the hustle and bustle of creating specific, tailor-made, manufacturing, analog driven for a specific site and when content can change from the weekend to the workdays, from the morning to the evening, when it's fully immersive, and we are launching it on October 30th. so this is about 30 days from today. Our first client will be a massive CE brand, and oh my God, people will see it in the media for sure, I'm telling you it's mind boggling. Just the storytelling, the possibilities. someone that's seen it said I feel like it's the iPhone for retail because there's just so many options, 

So if I'm a massive CE brand, and I book future stores, what am I getting and what are the parameters? Do I have to book for a month? Can I book it for a day? Is it staffed for me or do I have to bring in staff? How does all that work? 

Ariel Haroush: You can book it in slots of a week to two weeks to four weeks. We don't want the brand to come in and take it for six months because that's going against kind of the thesis of a high street is constantly being dynamic and we don't think the shoppers would care if it's not changing all the time. 

You get everything basically. It's a full retail operation that you don't have to invest in the time in, because all the walls and the ceiling and everything, all the tech components are already built up. All you need to do is explain your content and we can help you with that as well, and you have the back of the house. So what do you basically need is basically your decision. If you need security at the door because people are going to queue outside, we can provide your security guard at the fee. But the rest is everything is okay. It's ready for usage. 

So the huge project plan with the endless Gantt charts and everything else you would have to do, if you were leasing the space on your own and staffing it and designing it in the whole nine yards, that's covered off. 

A CE brand can just say, I want this for two weeks. Is it available in this time window? There's obviously  some planning they still have to do, but 90% of it is gone. 

Ariel Haroush: Exactly. You're really getting a turnkey solution and the beauty about it is that you can say, “Hey, I know I'm going to launch a product in late March and I need to be in an extra X amount of cities. Can I book it now?” Knowing that it's going to wait for you and knowing that you have the possibility to use your own content for it is just, I think it's the future. Now, this is my thesis, of course, but time will tell. 

I wrote about this the other day and I said it's about two blocks away from Outernet London and very reminiscent of that, but there's some very big differences as well that's mostly about public art and so on, but it's the same kind of experience, right? 

Where you walk in, you've got LED on the walls, you've got LED on the ceiling, and everywhere else. 

Ariel Haroush: Yeah, and Outernet, good friends of mine, they did phenomenally well. Frankly speaking, it's becoming the number one destination in London and well deserved by the way, because it's people just coming in and getting inspired and I love that.

I love the people getting inspired just by walking in the street, and they do amazing content, but yes, it's a different proposition because they are more of a public arts media component. We are all about future retail, while they provide a sense of awareness, we are providing the awareness piece, but also the consideration and the conversion. So there is an ROI component to it that is very clearly measured. We spoke about retail media, in essence, it is retail media in the real world because we're enabling you as a brand to get all the eyeballs, but you convert the eyeballs to people getting into the store experiencing the product with also the option to buy 

What is technically in there? Is it fine pitch LED on the walls and ceiling? 

Ariel Haroush: That's correct I mean we have the highest resolution of LEDs anywhere installed in London. So if you compare it to Outernet, the density of our pixel rate is much, much more advanced. That's a given because we started way later than they did, so they had to commit to a technology that is probably three years old. We have amazing brightness. You're not going to be able to see the pixels, it's just as much of a high resolution, millions of pixels around the stores, which is super impressive to see. 

I think on October 30th, when we launch, people will really grasp the magnitude of it. 

Who is behind this?

Ariel Haroush: Myself and two other partners that I have, but I'm the driving force behind the concept. 

So you have an extremely vested interest in making this work. 

Ariel Haroush: Yeah, absolutely, and it's weird to say it because I am a businessman and obviously the financial world is a metric, but my reasoning for doing that was not for financial gain. I'm really passionate about where I can take this industry forward, and there's just so many possibilities. I'm 50 years old this year, so I took three weeks in India and I was trying to look for my Zen and one of the random meetings that I had in India, I met this very nice lady from the Richmond group and she was doing a one year tour. She wanted to retire and she said, you know what, I'm just going to go on my own, we had dinner and she asked me, “Ariel, tell me about your business” and I decided to speak about Future Stores versus Outform, which is a much more mature business, and she said, “okay, I get it, it sounds exciting, but what's your gain? Do you really want to just make money?”

And it really poked me in an interesting way, and I said, why do you ask that in the sense that the way you asked it. She said, no, I'm just trying to understand. I said there is a motive that I'm trying to do that I'm not describing to many people, but, given how you frame it, I want to describe it to you and she said,well,  go ahead.

I said, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is, I'm not going to use a big statement, but democratizing the high streets, if you think about it, it's something that I'm really passionate about and you ask why. Because frankly speaking, if you think about the high street is kept to the typical candidates that you can already list down without me even need to say it. It's those big brands that you see everywhere and they occupy all the time the high street and it's not like we're not going to engage with them, on the contrary we will, but I want to be in a position that I hold at least 25% of the time of future stores into new brands, innovative brands, brands that are not necessarily going to get the time of the day to be on the high street, but they are the up and coming brands. So we are talking right now with a couple of brands that I'm super excited about that people are going to learn about. 

There are celebrity launches. There are other people that really have amazing stories to tell in the high street, and they just don't get the visibility to be on the high street. So that's another motivation that I have outside of just the financial aspiration that this concept has, and this concept, should it be successful? It will scale to a variety of different locations across the globe.

London, obviously it's an advanced build or probably ready to go, but other cities you mentioned like Champs-Élysées, Tokyo, are these ones in the pipeline or are these ideas of what could happen? 

Ariel Haroush: Tokyo is what could happen. But obviously, if you think about where would be the most relevant cities to start with, it's not a secret that New York, London and Paris are going to be the top three at least from my lens. Asia is a bit far away at this stage. We still need to prove the business model. But yes, we have active engagement in the other cities that I mentioned, and we are just vetting the final sites as we speak. 

This is the sort of thing that is very clever and everything else without question, but it's also something that a commercial property developer could look at and go, “Yeah, I'm going to build that too and I'll give it a different name and I'll tweak it just enough to make it mine.” 

How do you deal with that? 

Ariel Haroush: I'll say good luck with that. The level of complexity in storytelling and working in collaboration, I would never even dream to do that if it wasn't for my experience in Outform. 

I have so much experience in Outform, doing it for 20 years. I understand what it takes and how to tell stories in retail. Landlords want to be landlords, and many of them are already approaching. I said, why don't we partner? And that makes sense in order to scale it faster. But yeah, you need a certain level of expertise to know what you're doing. This is not just a typical media play. It's much more than that. 

This is not just slapping up, some fine pitch LED and renting a high profile space. 

Ariel Haroush: No, there is so much more built into that, because you need to think about it in a retail operation mindset, you need to think about it in a media mindset, you need to think about it from a storytelling perspective, and you really need to maximize what we call the funnel.

Because if you think about the marketing funnel, it's built in such a way that you spend money on awareness and that's usually going out of home media or TV or whatever, then you spend money on consideration, which is experiential, pop ups, you name it, and then you have the conversion piece, which mostly kept to retail stores. And last but not least, the royalty component. That's the marketing funnel. We are, in essence, trying to flatten the funnel so you get your awareness, consideration and conversion all in one location, but there is also a huge component that I don't think people understand the value of it, but they will, which is the amplification.

If you look at Outernet as an example, for every campaign that they're running, they have tens of millions of views of people who have never even been to Outernet, and if you look at every single thing that the Sphere did in Vegas, they have hundreds of millions of shares of something. People have never even been to Vegas, but they know about the Sphere. This has an additional impact Future Stores will be able to deliver. 

If you ask me, Ariel, people tried before. Why would that be any difference? Scale and also inmindset, because when I moved to the States, someone said to me, go big or go home. And I asked, what do you mean by that? And he said, if you're not putting everything in, then it's just not good. That's what we're trying to do. You cannot compromise the location. You cannot say, let me bring this huge brand for a store that looks like a mobile store. They just are not going to do it.

So if you want to get people to take you seriously, you have to go all in and that's what we've done here. So we're talking about a huge investment that we're putting into the high street. Probably if you think about London outside of the Outernet, it's probably the biggest investment ever done in a retail store, and that's what we're going after, we're going after something that is quite impactful and if it's going to deliver the amount of eyeballs that we think it would, then people will notice it, and if people will notice it, then brands will start to see the value in it. 

I'm looking forward to seeing it at some point. I'm kicking myself now. I traveled through London to get to ISE in Barcelona, but I just did an overnight booking.

Ariel Haroush: Oh my God. I'll be very happy to host you there. I'm going there every now and then. It's still in a kind of a installation mode, but all the screens are up, we're now doing the testing. It's a site. The ceilings are super high, so you get the full immersion and without telling who is the first client, all I can say is that, once you see the first execution, it's mind boggling. It's really above and beyond what I ever imagined it to be. So I'm super pumped and excited about where this is going to go. 

October 30th, right? 

Ariel Haroush: Yep. 

All right. Thank you, Ariel. I think you're onto something. 

Ariel Haroush: I hope so. Thank you for taking the time.

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

The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers.

That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios

The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI.

I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO.

We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists? 

Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry. 

So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up. 

It’s a member organization? 

Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members. 

So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner?

Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats. 

Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app.

Anna Bager: They are members too.

Okay, so where would you cut it off? 

Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to take a pick, I probably would have called it location-based media because that's really what we are, right? Wherever there is signage or any type of ad that's there because of the location, and the context that is there it seems to be a good place to reach consumers or business people because they're there at that time and they might be receptive to a message.

So anyone who's in that could be retail media networks. It could be retail organizations, could be place-based. It could be a point of care, like doctor's offices, but we typically don't have those companies as members, but they could be. Also, one thing that I think is common for most of our members is that we're one too many advertisers. We're not targeting individuals so it can be seen by many. So anyone who's doing that could be a member of the OAAA. 

You mentioned retail media networks. I was going to ask about that later, let's get into it. You mentioned it. I'm curious because of the rise of that and how you're starting to see more and more activity around the in-store piece of it and not just the online and mobile parts. Are they different budgets? 

Anna Bager: I think so. I think it depends. It's certainly a growth opportunity for the industry. Retail in general is taking place in a store, a lot of it online, but you have to get people there or you have to get them interested. You also may want to amplify a message before they're in the store, you want to serve them an offer and that's where we can come in. 

The retail media networks themselves, buy a lot of media also on behalf of their advertisers. So it could be a Coca-Cola, right? They buy media for them. I think that out-of-home is a natural part of media that you should buy to create the most bang for the buck for a company, it's not just in the stores, it's everything around and creates an audience extension, et cetera. So there might be other budgets. It's definitely a different type of buyer, but I think we're uniquely positioned and I think we play an important role in the world of retail media, reaching consumers on the go or even at home. 

I think what these networks have can be very useful, especially now that out-of-home has become more digital and you can increasingly use data and target in a very different way and also change out messages really fast. These guys have first-party data, from loyalty programs or consumers basically leaning in and allowing them to use their data and the ability to then use that data on the knowledge of where consumers might be or on the go, or, the interest they might have and use contextual and location-based advertising makes it just so much better. I think it's a great match. The ability to use the data to do that. 

So what's the state of being out-of-home at this point? In your keynote, which I think was for your annual conference, you talked about double-digit growth. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I mean out-of-home has had an interesting journey since the pandemic. Before that, we were growing very steadily every year, then obviously we had a dip in the pandemic and then we had an amazing year in 2022, where I think out-of-home were faster than any other ad media. And since then, it's been steadily going up. This year is particularly interesting. There's a lot going on. We have an election that's coming up that's driving a lot of ad dollars and also not just ad dollars into out-of-home, but also into other media where other brands then look for a positioning somewhere else. So there's just a lot of movement in the market right now.

It’s an economy that hopefully will start growing again. So it's been a good year. We keep growing and I think next year is going to be hopefully even better than this year. 

And does digital now represent the overall kind of installed base and also a percentage of overall revenue?

Anna Bager: Digital is interesting. So I think it's probably around 30 percent of all the installed base, but it's close to half of the revenue and most of the growth is coming from digital, so definitely an area that the industry is investing in and I want to keep moving forward. 

Is it harder and harder to sell static?

Anna Bager: No, I don't think so. I think it's just really easy to sell digital. I think you can still sell static. Static has a lot of benefits too. You have a message up for a very long time, right? It's very sturdy and you know that it works and then again, you put a billboard up, for example, it's going to be there for 30 or more days. So It's the same message that just is engraved in the sense of a little bit of a mini landmark, right? So static works really well too and for certain types of advertisers. It's absolutely key. But obviously digital has the ability to switch out content fast, use data, and do some interesting creative executions too because it's a huge growth area for us.

We talked about retail media before the ability, you can do that with static too, and you can get static up fast today, but the ability to include out-of-home in more of an omnichannel media mix, it's far greater over digital because it's just there. You can just kind of plug it in.

Is efficiency the big attraction? The fact that you can book something very rapidly. 

Anna Bager: For digital? It all depends on the goals of the advertiser. Obviously, to be able to get a message up really fast is important. Also, to be able to switch out a message really fast, if you need to, is important. The ability to again, be able to use data. If it's raining or if it's sunshine or if there's a specific event going on that day or in that place or in that moment, you can use that knowledge to put up better ads, but it's also sometimes, the creative opportunities you have with digital can allow you to do really cool things. Anything spectacular and amorphic, brands love that, right? That's mostly digital. So there are just so many different things you can do. It all depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve. 

You mentioned anamorphic, the idea of 3D visual illusions, is that kind of the bright shiny object, and there's a bright shiny object every 2-3 years that comes along and the old object gets abandoned?

Anna Bager: I don't think so. Out-of-home is so many different things. Some call it iconic, some call it spectacular. Within that category, definitely it's the anamorphic or things like the Sphere. I think that's just a different part of being out-of-home, which I think will always be very interesting to brands who want to make a big mark.

Clearly, you can get a lot of earned media through great executions because It's very socially shareable and you can give it global legs, it's done really well. So I think that's one type of out-of-home. I don't think it's a shiny object, even though it is a shiny object. I think it's just something that brands are very interested in right now, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there are other types of digital boards or signage, and not just roadside stuff, that works really well for brands in certain ways. I think the power of our industry is that we can reach pretty much everyone at any point in time, anywhere, right? And it doesn't really matter if that's static digital or anamorphic. It's just the reach that we have that then, through social media and other channels creates a sort of an interactive space too. That's not just a physical space. The power of the medium is the reach and it doesn't really matter what type of signage it is, I think. 

It's interesting with the anamorphic stuff, I've seen it in person, and I've seen tons of videos around it. Most of it's not very good. It's something spinning or pushing out of a screen and who cares, and it begs the larger question, when I drive around in a big city and I see a lot of digital out-of-home billboards, I think most of the creative isn't very good. There's too much on there, and I just find it weird for an established medium that so many creatives just don't get it.

Anna Bager: Out-of-home is probably the most prestigious thing you can do as a creative if you want to go for those really big campaigns, but it's also really hard and that's why it's so prestigious. Less is more. Simplicity works really well. Don’t overdo it. Think it through. But it's an art form.

I think there's a lot of bad creative but there's also some really amazing creative. The interesting thing is you remember both. So from my perspective, and it doesn't necessarily take away from your opinion of the brand if you don't think the ad is great. You still remember and you see it and you register and you might go and buy the product.

But obviously, I think, I wish everyone did better, because there's so much you can do with out-of-home because you own the whole campus, it's all yours to do something with, there's nothing but a location surrounding it, you can do really cool things, but, yeah, there's good and there's bad, but like I said, you still remember it, and I think that's the real key point, but I think with out-of-home market, just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should, and I think, I agree with you, but it's very subjective, what you like, obviously. But with that type of signage, still a lot of experimentation, I think, on let's do something really cool, and then does it really make sense or does it have a connection to the product? Maybe not, but yeah. 

Yeah. I suppose it's like any advertising. There's really great national advertising and big-budget campaigns, but there's a whole bunch of more local and even hyperlocal ads and they're not produced by big agencies with top-tier creatives.

I was in a rental car recently driving through Toronto on the 401, so 401 is slow, so you got lots of time to look at billboards, and I still couldn't absorb everything on some of these because there was just so much stuff trying to be jammed in there. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. You have to think about that. You have to think that the audience is going to have very little time to look at it, right? Unless there's a traffic jam. Therefore you have to make it so that they can see, they can register, they can get it. They also maybe can remember that one little thing that you want them to Google, it shouldn't be too much on them. I agree.

But I have to say that, and I just came back this morning from my, event that we did in Las Vegas where we had a lot of our members present, different interesting creative executions, and there were a lot of great local out-of-home. You don't have to be, like, one of the biggest creative agencies on Madison Avenue to create good content. There are a lot of locals out-of-home that play to them, it is very local, just knowing the audience. 

I'll give you one really cool example. There's a law firm called Morgan & Morgan and they are pretty much everywhere, they're big out-of-home buyers, you would consider that local advertising, even though they're in many parts of the country. I think this was last year, they took some of their billboards and put graffiti all over, the Morgan & Morgan information called Morgan & Morgan and what ended up happening was that they got so many calls. Where people said, Oh my God, your billboard has been vandalized. Are you aware? And people really paid attention to it to the point where they had to take them down because people couldn't get through. Because there are so many calls. If you're very smart about it and you're speaking to an audience that is there and feels a certain connection to it because it's local, you can do really cool things and I think there's great advertising on both sides and bad. 

Is the profile of media owners evolving? I asked because I used to think of media owners as just being the media companies, Mars and Patterson up in Canada and so on. But I have been hearing that property owners and commercial property owners are blocking and tackling big LED displays on the corners of their new builds or renovated builds, and then engaging a media company to sell their stuff. So they own the display as opposed to the media company leasing that space. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I don't know if that's more now than before I can speak to that. That's definitely a phenomenon, right? And you see not just in the U S that all over the world. If you own property and you're smart about it, if there's an ability to put up a sign there, of course, you should do it if it doesn't make the building uglier or cause problems in any other way, and I think we see more and more of that and then they usually use media companies to sell it for them because out-of-home is not that easy.

Yeah, I've been in this for 25 years, and I still remind people that advertising isn't as easy as you think it is. 

Anna Bager: No, it's supposed to look easy, but very hard. That's for sure, and there's a lot that goes into I think especially with out-of-home I am fairly new to the industry. I've been here five years. I come from the regular traditional digital media side, and it's fascinating, like the know-how location and real estate and just like how to best leverage the space that you have, that this industry has, that is not the same in other places, even though the concept is the same, it's just very different. 

In the keynote you did earlier this year, one of the things you said is we need a clean, simple supply chain without too many intermediaries. What did you mean by that? 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I think that's very important. Basically as the industry becomes more digital, and not just the industry, as advertising as a whole is more and more transacted in an automated or programmatic fashion and you can do static in that as well. It's important that once you start doing it that way, you lose a little bit of control of what's going on, and there are a lot of middlemen that can insert themselves along the way, and there can be a little lack of transparency as to who's actually making money or who's taking cut where.

And that's something that digital media on the traditional side, as programmatic started growing and automation struggled quite a bit, and it wasn't just under the transparency and understanding of kind of how, what the supply chain looked like from a commercial point of view, it's also from a brand safety and fraud perspective, you want it to be very clean, very simple, and very straightforward what goes on in the supply chain.

So the media owner knows what's happening between them and the brand actually posting the ad, and the other way around, it just makes things a lot better, and I think we have an opportunity as an industry because we're building this now to avoid a lot of the mistakes that I think did happen, when digital media came up and if you look at digital media today in programmatic, there's like 30-45% fraud or impressions that never get served. Now, our industry doesn't really have that problem. Our ads always get served pretty much, but, so maybe we don't need to have verification in the same way, but there's still, a lot of things that happen there that where there's a waste, and we don't really know where that money goes, but I think we can avoid, on our end. So that's what I meant, and I think these next couple of years are going to be critical. We're going to need a lot of people to learn a lot of know-how we're going to need to learn. There are a lot of interesting companies that can help, but there are also a lot of players that are just going to try and make a buck because they can and don't necessarily add any value to the overall transaction.

When I look at the ad tech landscape, I get cross-eyed very quickly because there are so many companies selling their capabilities and they all describe what they do a little bit differently. It must be daunting to somebody taking a look at this. 

Anna Bager: That's exactly it. There's a very, who you may know, smart banker, but he's also an industry figure, Terence Kawaja from Luma. He's created something called a Lumascape, which kind of illustrates, and yes, you can get lost in that pretty quickly. We want to keep it as simple as possible. There's like an ad tech company for everything. There's been a lot of money to invest in those types of companies, but in the end, you really have to provide value and improvement to the transaction, otherwise, you shouldn't be in there. 

You also said in the keynote that more than 50% of media owners are now using AI. What hit me with that is why it is so low? 

Anna Bager: That actually was a survey that we did, I think at the end of last year. So I'm sure it's higher now and I think it's growing exponentially. At the time I thought, huh, interesting. I think everyone uses AI these days and I think you have to, if for nothing else, because everyone uses it. So you're going to be way behind if you don't, and I think in our industry, same things as everyone else, great creative solutions, great ways of just getting content out faster, making sure that you take into consideration all the different data and things that you might need to know to do a better job. So I think AI is critical. There's a lot of bad with AI, but there's also a lot of good.

I think the industry this year, since we did the survey, is probably a lot higher now. We should probably do it again. But we haven't done that yet, but it might be more, it might be closer to a 100%. 

Yeah, it strikes me as it's not the highly visible stuff, the creating ads from scratch and so on. It's much more about automation and the things that can be done to increase efficiency and accuracy. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. In the end, that's where it really can help. That and content creation. Of course, you just have to be very careful with AI because you really need to know where the data is coming from and how it's being used and be able to argue that if somebody were to challenge you, right? There's a lot of privacy, and regulatory murkiness around the whole thing. So you gotta be responsible and try to know what you're doing when you're using it. But obviously, it's an incredible tool. 

You mentioned earlier, that this is an election year, which no one can't help but know that these days. I'm curious in terms of budget and financials and forecasts and everything else, does a presidential election year have to be weighted in terms of every four years, there's a bit of an anomaly in terms of spend and then we go back to normal? 

Anna Bager: Obviously big elections, definitely there's so much more money on the market, but out-of-home as a platform is great, every two years there's an election, there's a lot of local elections all the time, there's a lot of advocacy groups and others that are out there with political messaging and our platform lends itself really well to that.

Out-of-home is not just an advertising platform, it's also a platform for public service messaging. A lot of that, right? And we're there, we can reach any consumer. Consumers who might not trust the media, who might not speak the language, whatever it might be, you can put a message up and reach them through signage. Political advertising, depending on how you defend it, I think it's a growth area for out-of-home and something that's not on or off, but obviously this election is also how it's happened, right? There's a lot going on at the very end. I think for everyone, it's a huge opportunity and then we'll have to deal with the aftermath of whatever that might be. 

Oh boy, hopefully not too much of an aftermath. 

I've been over in Europe a couple of times at conferences in the past year and speaking on panels and one of the things that would come up over and over again was sustainability which is a huge issue in Europe for digital out-of-home companies and all digital signage operators and I was asked, "What's happening in Canada and the US?” And I said, it's nowhere near the issue. I'm curious what the OAAA's take is. 

Anna Bager: Oh, we have a sustainability task force. We are very closely monitoring what's happening in Europe. We have a lot of members or not a lot, but we have a few members that have operations there too.

I think it's not as much of a focus here as it is in Europe, but I think it will be, and if you look at big global brands and agencies, they are going to ask for a better insight into how sustainable something was. So you need to pay attention to it. I think what's interesting with out-of-home is though, we might see him as a non-sustainable medium because you drive cars or you ride on airplanes or, But given that we are a one to many media, one ad can reach so many people, and it sits up there for a reasonably long time and it pretty much always reaches an audience, and it doesn't consume as much electricity or power as a lot of other media, in particular, digital does, the production of the ads can be very efficient.

There's something called the Green GRP. We are probably the ones who are best positioned there. We are far more sustainable in other media formats. So what we're focused on is how we better tell that story without greenwashing, and how we can help our members grow with the increasing demands that will come both from the government and from the brands and the agencies around these issues.

So I think it's important. I also think it's important, right? Like whether you believe in it or not, there's definitely something going on with the environment. So it's good to be protective of it, and I think our industry is very responsible. A lot of our members, even if they're in the US have sustainability officers and are constantly looking at how we can improve and make our industry better from that perspective. 

So no, it's a very important thing for us, and we are really looking into both who we can partner with and also what's going on in other markets, to see if we can learn. 

Is the adoption of the change going to be driven somewhat by starting to understand the impact on power bills and realizing, Oh yes, we can do work to address climate change, but we can also reduce our operating costs? 

Anna Bager: Sometimes, probably yes. There can be efficiencies and that's always good, but I think it really depends. I don't think everything reduces the operating costs, but some might, and then that's a form of sustainability too. Yeah, I think you should take all things into consideration. 

I think it's definitely something everyone should be aware of and take a close look at how they're running their operations, and see if they can make changes. 

I met recently with a company that does specialty displays, primarily focused on the digital out-of-home market and one of the things they're tinkering with is large format e-paper displays. So very energy-friendly. I know e-paper quite well, I've been looking at it for years and years. It's getting quite good but there are compromises in terms of color reproduction and everything else, and I asked, what do the brands think of this? Are they fine with it? 

And I was surprised to hear that, yeah, they get it. They understand we don't have maybe the exact color reproduction that we want, but it does other things for us. 

Anna Bager: That's a great example. You don't let perfection get in the way of good, or whatever it is that you say.

Look, we all have a common interest here, and I think if there's something that you can use that's more efficient or more sustainable, maybe less costly, I think that's a good way to convince the brand to do so. That's good news, I think. 

It's also smart to go and ask them for us before developing something, saying here, “Look what we did”, and then they go, “Yeah, I don't like that.”

Anna Bager: That's a a very good point, for sure. 

Happens all the time, but people keep doing it. 

Anna Bager: That is true. 

Alright, thank you for your time, this was great. 

Anna Bager: Thank you, this was really nice and good to speak to you.

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

When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive.

I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications.

I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side.

David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage.

Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams.

For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo.

Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave. 

Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right?

Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology? 

And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive.

You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right? 

Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time. 

So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left. 

It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it. 

We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good. 

My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool.

So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate. 

Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office. 

So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer?

Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home?

I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things.

So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it. 

When you say customer-facing, how do you define that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment.

What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar. 

How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outstanding way to show use cases and product information, and really shape an experience when you have your customers in your space. Tell me if that was a good answer for what you were hoping to define.

You did fine. Since more and more in the marketplace, larger customers, whether you want to call them enterprise or choose a name, are looking to slim down the number of vendors that they have, and they would like one vendor to do multiple things. Have you found that with some of your established clients that maybe you started with the workplace communications piece that they've then asked about doing large video walls, things like that, and on the flip side, maybe, whether it's an airline or an automaker, I'm thinking of some of your clients, more established clients. Have they said, yeah, we'd now like to also do workplace communications. Do you do that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. First of all, if we make our clients successful, naturally, those teams that manage whatever solution they're implementing are getting questions from their peers on, how do I do that? You know, can you help me, and, who's your partner making this possible?

So we see expansion across the products they own and new use cases. As you mentioned, maybe they're doing employee comms on screens and then it becomes large video walls and experiential things, maybe it's facilities related to meeting room signs, wayfinding, et cetera. 

To the other element of your question, they're also saying if that partner is making us successful, where else can we use them? They do want to consolidate solutions to one vendor that they have success with. That's the biggest question that comes up with my clients. If I invest in you, how are you going to guarantee this solution is successful? And my team sees an ROI and it's not another tool that goes unused. So without a doubt, there's a desire, I believe, by Finance and IT to consolidate technology and vendors, as much as possible, especially if there's a track record of driving a return on the investment and making teams successful.

I'm guessing the conversations are very different than they were, 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, in terms of. I would say in the past, in the history of this digital signage was sold and people were interested in, from the idea of the kind of the sizzle of the screens, the visual elements of it and these days, instead of talking to marketing people, you're talking to IT people and they care about security and they care about data integration, things like that, is that accurate? 

Joe Giebel: That is 100 percent accurate and I think you highlight in 2005, when we started the screen had such a sizzle, most homes didn't have flat-screen TVs. We were talking about plasmas back then. The iPhone didn't exist. So the concept of a touch screen and a large flat screen display, made life a real fun for digital signage. 

Now the screens are more common. security and value, are kind of the table stakes to get into the game and where you really start to differentiate, you you understand the use case and how that is going to benefit a company, whether you're increasing productivity, reducing risk, and is that apparent? And do they understand how you're going to deliver that? And then on the security side, you almost don't get to pass go if you don't have a security posture that can scale globally, and, provide a safe feeling.

I don't even think they have worries, right? You just don't do business with a vendor that's going to create worry, they've either got the security you need or you move on. 

Yeah, and I mean, at least historically, I'm not sure where you're at right now, but historically you had a very large casino group and you had a very large Airline and those are two companies that have to be like, everybody has to be concerned about security, but they really care about security. 

Joe Giebel: They do. It's paramount, obviously it presents a ton of risk. If you don't have that secure environment that matches their standard and those two examples, especially within the gaming world, those are tremendous partners of ours that kind of walked us through: Here's where you need to be, and we're so fortunate to have worked with them, and been able to develop that security posture with them in real world scenarios. 

If you haven't set up gaming integrations and received gaming licenses. That is an in depth process that most of your leadership gets to go through and they get into personal stuff, they do a great job of remaining secure 

So if you're going to work with those kinds of whale clients, you got to be prepared for a lot of hand holding and a long process? 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. They're going to look at everything. I mean, they will find if you've got an NFL pick thing going on internally and you somehow put that interface onto a website, they're going to find that and they're going to ask you questions on why you're running a gambling ring. It goes that in-depth.

They will see your resumes, they're going to do background checks on most of your team. So, there is a process to it. it takes some time and they leave no stone unturned. 

It's been a few years now. Was the process of blending two companies, and I believe it's actually three companies that were kind of blended together, was that a bit of a journey?

Joe Giebel: It is absolutely. Our company for the early history, we bootstrapped it. We had a visionary CEO that founded the company with one partner and we were a tight-knit family that didn't have outside investors. Taking on outside investment was a journey, and an experience, and then as we acquire, these are new experiences for our teams and so it is a bit of a journey. 

There's the whole business operations side of things and how do you get multiple systems to speak to each other? How do we blend processes and then you've got the cultural elements of bringing organizations together, and you have to balance all of that? The people need to remain happy, the systems have to work. So it was a process and if I look at my resume and time with these organizations, what an education it's been for the last 19 years. 

Are there kinds of tribes, so to speak? I'm curious if the operation in Cork, Ireland, which was where Poppulo, came from. Is that the workplace side and are the people in Denver more focused on digital signage? 

Joe Giebel: You know, that's part of the journey and the early stages of the journey you definitely have. I'll stick with your term tribes and people that have knowledge and quite honestly, comfortability with a certain way of doing business.

Along that journey, you start to see that tribal element go away, and you start to see the company mesh and become one organization that grows, and so early on, Denver had to be the hub for digital signage. It’s a, I don't want to say complex, but if you're used to selling a pure SaaS solution, and then you start to add in hardware and the different elements of digital signage, it's more than you're used to and without a doubt, I hadn't talked about email and corporate communications in that sense prior to the acquisition. So it took me time to understand it.

 I would say now, our entire company is so excited about a multi-channel tool, that everybody's leaned into it at this point and we work cross functionally quite well. It extends the workday quite a bit. 

I'm sure there was also a bit of a journey kind of massaging and figuring out the right message, because going to target customers and saying, we do this and we do this, and we also do this must've potentially left them a little cross eyed.

Joe Giebel: Without a doubt. I think we've learned along the way, when to talk about. the channel for a client and when to focus on a specific offering, and that's a delicate dance as well to feel that out. Because not every customer understands our vision quickly, and they certainly don't share the excitement that we have over new stuff because it's not at the forefront of what they do every day. So you can absolutely create a ton of confusion, and we probably did that, in the early process of coming together as Poppulo. 

It probably feels like you're trying to sell them more stuff. 

Joe Giebel: You know, as a sales guy, I'm probably insensitive to that, but, yeah, absolutely. You kind of get that sense when someone's sniffing out a salesperson coming into the room, and I bet we did pass that as well. 

At the end of the day, we are trying to sell more stuff, but if we can't illustrate what the value is and why it makes sense to buy more solutions from us, we haven't done our job and we're probably not going to win that. So at the end of the day, we really do want to try to enhance the offerings and drive value to our client base. 

You also have an office now in Bangalore, India. Is that a Dev team or a remote Dev team? 

Joe Giebel: You know, we've got a number of functions, including development in Bangalore and that's an exciting market. I just saw endless content about how important digital signage is in India, and so we were excited to open that office up. I think it's been open for several months. We held our grand opening last week, but we've got a great team there, including a lot of technical folks and so we're very excited about that expansion. 

But it's sales as well? It's not just purely, what would be perceived at least as being lower-cost, software development than what you would pay in North America. 

Joe Giebel: Correct. It's not purely an offshoring effort. We see some strategic elements there. We've always provided technical experts to support our clients 24/7. That certainly helps the effort. We used to do that from Denver and have people working through the night. We now have folks in support as well in Bangalore. 

The work culture in India, I think opens up a ton of possibilities for any digital signage vendor. That's looking at how do I enhance the workplace and employee experience within an office. I think that's going to be a tremendous market. 

Yeah. I mean, it's a vast market. I suspect the challenge is based on the emails and pitches I get from people that the expectations on cost for SaaS licensing, software, and so on are somewhat lower than they are in North America.

Joe Giebel: It's interesting, and some of the organizations there, that's a tough game if you don't have scale in what we're talking about, oftentimes though, if an organization is looking at this correctly, they're looking to roll out at scale and obviously we can build in better commercials that way, to better understand that, but without a doubt, as we look at a number of our clients are truly global, you do feel that pressure, as you go region to region, and that's an interesting thing you've got to handle, and try to solve for. 

Do you have a client who you're allowed to talk about, because often the larger ones, it's difficult to get any permissions, that kind of really reflects the full meal deal of what you can do in terms of workplace, venue-based, customer-facing digital signage, maybe staff facing digital signage, like the whole shoot and match? 

Joe Giebel: You know, I think Delta Airlines is a great client that takes advantage of most of our solutions, and then especially within digital signage, they've got so many use cases that they deploy both employee-facing, above wing for the passengers and below wing for the employees.

So I think that's a good client that, we're fortunate does a lot of speaking about the solutions and is someone we can discuss. 

Yeah, you've had them for a long time, right? Like, at least a decade. 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. Long-term client. They started out with employee comms, and they've won a number of awards in the industry for some of the innovations that they do. I believe last year we started rolling out passenger-facing applications broadly for flight information displays. 

Yeah. I did a podcast with Ryan Taylor going back about three years or something, and I've been seriously impressed by what Delta is doing.

Because they totally get it, you can use screens really help inform the passenger journey and from the moment you walk into the check-in area all the way post-security. What was really intriguing was what they were doing, as you said, below the wing with, ramp information screens that are talking to the guys who are heaving bags into the planes and everything.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, that's right. It's heartwarming when you see them roll out, one Ryan, leads a team that focuses on a number of things. Digital signage is a large part of it and they all understand what use cases and applications we can leverage digital screens for to help our customers and our employees.

But when you see images of a 30-year pilot pulling up to a gate, and the ramp information display is saying, thanks for your work and dedication to Delta, and you know, that pilot's retiring it. That's a cool use of the technology, and it feels good that they think that's helping them build their culture and recognize people. It's awesome to see that in use, and in context like that. 

The industry obviously has evolved quite a bit over 20 years. I'm curious about what you're seeing these days that you're seeing more and more customer demand for, I suspect it's things like data integration. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. I think data integration is the key and trying to understand, how do we make these things real? 

The industry is asking for, it's odd when I hear it, I want consumer grade. Because I think 15 years ago you wanted everything to be the commercial grade which seemed to mean Strength quality, you know now they're thinking about the experience and consumer-grade is the goal. Consumer grade meaning I want it to react and be as simple As you know, maybe a social media app, and what I experienced on my personal devices need to be intuitive and need to be smooth.

There can't be a need for training on how to interact with this thing. So, part of that is data integration. Is the data automated? Is it near real-time, and accurate? And are we putting the right data in front of people that they want? And you've got to have flexibility on that integration side because oftentimes, we'll see things get deployed and we see behaviors driven and it's like, wow, we didn't predict our clients and us and our project teams will say, we didn't predict those results. Let's tweak this and this to get back towards what we were driving and that flexibility and data integration, I think is the cornerstone of being able to deliver that experience.

You have a platform you call Harmony. Is that the piece that kind of stitches together the different components versus, yeah, I just want the digital signage thing or I just want the email marketing thing? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. So as you start to think about all these channels coming together, we call that platform harmony and it is a multi-channel, omnichannel approach to putting content really, I want to say communications, but, let's say getting content in front of the right people at the right time, and it gives you that ability to broadcast across every channel, or maybe you're using our analytics to say, “Look, we know these disconnected workers are not looking at the email, so we don't need to address them with email, that's creating too much noise.” So that concept or that name of Harmony, is the concept of all these channels coming together in harmony within an organization. 

Without giving away business details, I'm curious, what percentage of customers are using Harmony versus those who still just want the traditional workplace comm stuff and those who just want digital signage for their retail environment or whatever it may be?

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we've got a massive client base. So I would say about 10 percent of them are taking advantage of multi-channel, and on what I would just define as the Harmony platform, and I would say we've probably had serious conversations with about 80 percent and are working with them on plans for which channels might make sense.

Oftentimes you've sold one solution to a team in the past, and that team's not going to necessarily handle that full digital strategy. So then it becomes a process of meeting the other stakeholders, showing them the value, and then planning how we roll this out. Because these are so highly visible, both digital signs, email, what we call feeds, putting messaging into collaboration tools, it's so visible that you have to be thoughtful on how you roll that out, how you plan it. So it takes a little bit of time. 

I'd say 10 percent are the early adopters and taking advantage right now and it's certainly something we evangelize across the client base. 

I suspect the leadership team likes that situation because there's a lot of growth potential there. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we absolutely love it.

The question then becomes, and what we've been working through quite honestly, for the last two years. How hard do you push on a platform play? And then how hard do you focus on nurturing the existing solutions and making sure that the teams that originally bought them aren't getting flooded with, “Hey, here's a shiny new toy.” And they're getting the adequate focus from us on how we make you most successful, within what you own and what are your expansion plans for that singular solution. 

So there is a balance and, honestly, it might come across as a little disrespectful, if you don't pick up on what the client needs in the moment and we don't mean it that way. But you got to have your ears open, and stay customer centric, as you kind of navigate those waters. 

All right. This is great. Good to catch up. if people want to know more, they'll find you just at poppulo.com? 

Joe Giebel: Poppulo.com is the best place to reach us and you'll start to see all those solutions, both from an individual, description and promotion, as well as here's how all these channels play together.

All right, Joe. Thanks again! 

Joe Giebel: Dave, great catching up. Thank you.

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

Projection has always been something of a fringe player in digital signage because of a series of technical barriers to adoption, most notably the limited operating life of the lamps, and the product and labor costs of switch them out. Laser projection has addressed that issue, but the other one that's harder to conquer is dealing with ambient light. Unless the projector is the size of a fridge, super-bright and seriously expensive, the environment's lights need to be off or dimmed and any windows covered.

A startup called Obsidian Screens, based on the fringes of greater Toronto, has developed a projection screen that can show visuals that aren't washed out even with the lights on and the blinds open - and as the brand name suggests, the screens are black instead of white or silver. It's a super-thin laminated material light enough to marry with foam - like a poster with a 1/4-inch foam backing to make it rigid and ready to hang.

Co-founder Chris Cavalieri and his business partner use Ambient Light Rejecting technology - something that's been around for years - but have their own "nanofilter" technology that does a better job, he says, of preserving projector brightness and visibility. And just as is the case with LED video walls, the more black on the display surface, the better the contrast.

The company has been around for seven years, but remains quite small ... as they have struggled to find the right partners to specify, sells and deploy their tech. They've run into at least a couple of challenges - with end-users who were disappointed by conventional projection set-ups, and pro AV integrators who for logical reasons want to sell systems that cost a lot more and need ongoing paid support and services.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thanks for joining me. You're based outside of the Greater Toronto Area and you've been working for a few years now on a company called, well, a product called Obsidian. Can you run through all of that for me? 

Chris Cavalieri: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate taking the time to talk about it and boy, do I have lots to say.

You have half an hour. Go!

Chris Cavalieri: All right. Perfect. No pressure. So Obsidian, I should probably talk a little bit about projection. So what we've been trying to do and we've been doing for a while, is trying to find a way to take all the benefits. So if anyone's in digital signage, I assume there's a few listening to this what incredible things can be done with projection. So things like projection mapping holographic displays, very unique, creative stuff, and it's absolutely fantastic, and when we started out, we looked at things and said, like, why isn't this used more? 

You know, we go to retail stores, we're going to shopping centers and there are LEDs, we've got LCD video walls now and only a few set cases, maybe a performance or display are using projection to its full potential and it begs the question is why, and that why is how we found it, our idea of Obsidian, which is to create a solution to get those benefits projection and make it a lot more accessible and practical in place of, or as an option compared to say our elite typical LED signage and LCD video walls. 

So, I mean, projection, it's very renovation friendly, it's very scalable, and depending on what projector you use, it can be quite a low cost, the benefits are endless, and compared to LEDs, which are quite glaring, most of the time, I'm biased, obviously, no shame in that, but most people don't want to stare at an LED board as a backing, screen for like a speaker stage, for example, casino games. We've talked to fellows in Vegas before. It causes fatigue for people who are near them for too long. And that's, that comes down to the human eye and there's a whole science behind it, the wavelength of lights and all that. I won't go into it. It works. It's bright. It gets people's attention, but it just doesn't give the same aesthetic as a good projection setup would. 

So coming back to it, why don't we use projection? And quite frankly, it's because it mostly just sucks because it fails. You need to have a dark room, dim room, or very well-controlled lighting, and by having controlled lighting and those restrictions, designers or retail commercial designers can't do solutions they want to do where this challenge is like a window nearby and sunlight there are challenges that they can't overcome and maintain a good looking display and that's where LEDs kind of help punch through that. 

So the question is what if we had a solution where projection can punch through that can give you those same benefits and versatility, but you can have nearby lights? You don't have to overly control your space. I mean, of course, you can't do shopping in a grocery store with your lights off or a shopping mall. You know, it's not practical. You might be able to do a half-hour show or presentation, but it doesn't make sense, and that's at least my conclusion personally, my experience is why we don't see more of these really cool-looking projection map displays than we do now. It doesn't work in most cases. When it does, it's great, but most of the time it doesn't. 

So Obsidian is basically to solve that problem. we've got our own proprietary technology and IP around it, and we've designed a system that harmonizes the projector and the screen, and we include the lighting as well for nearby lighting to essentially use the nanofiller technology to work together and what I mean in a very blunt sense from that is that these systems will work independent of the environment around it. So if people have heard of light rejecting screens, ALR screens essentially you have a gray screen or a silver screen. It'll absorb about 50%-60% percent of your light in the room and that gives you contrast, which is great because it helps you have a more adaptable, flexible display. 

What our system does is the same thing, but that absorption, instead of normally it'll absorb your projector. So your white becomes gray, silver, whatever it is. In our case, your projector can shine on the screen and your lights can shine near or on the screen and have no loss, so it will reflect off of it. It keeps its colors, it keeps its white balance, and then the ambient light that is basically using this filter will absorb completely, not just the 60%. Whereas everything else gets knocked down by 50%-60%, and it creates this really neat illusion and really efficient display where fundamentally it's the same as any projection system, but you can see all your colors just popping. You maintain your contrast and your white balance and it's almost like you've doubled the lumens in your projector, and we love this because this opened up an option for again, adding an accessible and affordable solution somewhere between a TV set, and an LED video wall, where again, you can have something that's highly visible. It's got wide viewing angles. It keeps its color resilient, but you can also be adaptive. So again seasonal renovations for a retail environment stores, places where you don't really want to control lighting or it's too much work to deal with it. Plus you can install the thing in under a day. I mean, we've hung screens in under an hour compared to perhaps weeks on a video wall. So maintenance costs and benefits are endless. 

So that was our goal with Obsidian again. What is holding it back from creating unique creative solutions? And how do we overcome that in this nanofilter system? And I think most people are afraid of it because it wasn't easy to develop and there are restrictions to it. Again, it's got to work as a cohesive system, that scared people and got a lot of resistance, but boy, does it work. 

You're an engineer. I'm absolutely not. For simpletons like me, the simpleton explanation would be that instead of this being a white or silver screen, it's a black screen, correct?

Chris Cavalieri: It is a black screen. So if you turn your projectors off and look at it, it'll look kind of a charcoal gray, maybe a little bit of a greenish tint to it, and you know, that's kind of like a decorative wall panel, and that's what it looks like. That's what it is, and that's because the light is bouncing off, it's still being absorbed. Their eyes don't have the nano filters in them. If you wear polarized sunglasses, you might, it might be interesting but that's essentially what's going on there. So it is indeed a dark-colored screen. 

When you describe it as a system, you're talking about the kit of parts, but your part is the screen. The challenge with projection and the reason. It wasn't it hasn't really grown very much in digital science or anywhere else used to be with the projector and the lamp life and how you'd have to replace it all the time and it was unreliable and also that it wasn't very bright. Lasers have changed that. other technologies have improved. So that side is somewhat conquered. However, if you want a very bright projector, you're getting something the size of an Austin Mini. But, the screen thing is still by and large a white screen, right?

Or film that you apply to a window glass that will make an image appear, but it's not very sharp or bright, I mean. 

Chris Cavalieri: Exactly. I mean, that's the only solution people had to date is to get a bigger projector, and what's really unique about using our nano filter technology is you don't need a brighter projector to achieve the same result as you would. So there's almost a savings. I mean, I don't want to just say upfront savings, there is maintenance still involved, laser projectors have been a huge benefit to the industry on that front. They still need to be replaced eventually. But by using these filters and creating this super high-efficiency system effectively, it's not just the screen, it's the pairing of the projector and the screen. You can add the lights optionally as well. That allows you to use about half the lumens you would require in just a punch-through projector to achieve the same visible results that same effective brightness called legibility, of the display, and you're getting a little bit higher contrast because the screen is naturally darker than a white canvas or a white painted wall.

Is it front projection or rear? 

Chris Cavalieri: Front projection right now. We do have a prototype of the rear projection. It does work. We were working with the Art Gallery of Ontario at one point on a display which was kind of fun, so we almost accidentally made it just out of curiosity. There is a rear projection system for it. It's got, it's. own little challenges and restrictions, mostly just size, I say it's the only thing remaining. So while we don't offer it as an off-the-shelf product at the moment, customized solutions, that is something we can whip up together and it does work quite well.

So is this almost like an architectural material that you could use instead of wallpaper or something if you wanted a projection surface in a retail environment or whatever?

Chris Cavalieri: Absolutely. In fact, at one point, we had a version where we put an adhesive on the back instead of, we normally use PVC foam just to keep it rigid for hanging on the wall and we called it digital wallpaper and I know TV sets have tried to replace that and transparent LEDs, but absolutely this the screen itself is only about a millimeter thick. It is flexible so you can wrap it on columns, you can create decorative panels, and again, it does have a nice finish to it. You can route the edges, it's cuttable, machinable, you name it, and from an architectural standpoint, yeah, it's perfect. I mean, decorative panels, unique shapes. You can do multiple shapes in an array. You can make it continuous, join them together, and project whatever you want, and even when it's off, it'll have that kind of charcoal gray, very soft, it's a glare-free canvas finish to it like a print, and it definitely works.

Could you print on it? 

Chris Cavalieri: Yes. We haven't done it, but because it's built as a laminate, there was a layer on the front layer that we'd be able to print on the back of before it's assembled. So yeah, we could print a still image into it or a texture, maybe like a woodgrain pattern to it onto that one layer, stick it together, and embed a static image to it, which you could then nest to the digital content. That'd be really cool. 

Is the front surface, the laminate part of it, is that like a fabric, or is that like an acrylic coating or something? 

Chris Cavalieri: It's a polycarbonate substrate. So it's a kind of a semi-rigid plastic, a very thin layer, but there's a few layers. So it's kind of a blend of vinyl polycarbonate. We've got a few in there, but that top one would be a polycarbonate. So quite durable, quite resistant. 

So you wouldn't have to rope it off or anything, people could be near it without being terrified that something's going to get damaged. 

Chris Cavalieri: No, it's quite resilient. I mean, you can scratch it if you really try, but to break it or crack it is extremely difficult.

What do you see as the primary use cases for it? 

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, I've been dreaming of retail, commercial, public display, but honestly, I'm one person. I'm an engineer. I just want to get these in the hands of absolutely phenomenal designers, architects out there, and interior designers, to let them just run wild because it's so adaptable. In fact, you can shape it, you can wrap it, tile it, and do 3D shapes. Usually, when we go to trade shows we'll do like we have a pop can, it's like a cylinder and we put like a Pepsi animation on it and you can do arrays of different shapes together, and like the limits of creativity are endless.

It's just like any good projection map and application. Get those into the right hands and it's a dream. So, I mean, I pictured grocery stores for advertising, to justify costs. So a lot of the time they have printed posters or a big mural at the back top of their store over their freezers and just put panels up. You have tons of ceiling space, running power, and signal to it, it’s dead easy compared to like an led array for that size of display, and now you have a source of revenue, advertising, promotion of the week, whatever it is, and you have that control. So I mean, a store designer can really go to town because of that ease of use, ease of access, and the flexibility of a projection system, which now works by using our filters.

What kind of challenges do you have around projection angles and things like that? 

I gather we're talking, ahead of this a little bit, and I was asking about ultra-short throw projection and so on and there are some limitations around that, like you want to be a little bit further back in terms of the throw on the angle.

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, so right now, a short throw to a standard throw, and of course, long throws are all good for it. We have done some tests with ultra-short throws, unfortunately, the optics in the ultra-short throw right now do conflict with the optics in the laminate. So we can't use it with that at the moment. Although, secret R&D projects #1, #10 or #20. We are working on a potential solution to that, which should be independent of the projector that may work, but I won't say it will till I prove it. So let's assume it doesn't for now, for an ultra short throw, but again, standard throw and even short throw, long throw setups are all fine. That's what we recommend, and that's nice too, because that gives you, again, control over angles. We do play with the optics a little bit on the screen and it's part of our secret as well, we do narrow a bit of the vertical cone and bend light horizontally. So you have a more uniform viewing experience for things like foot traffic from left to right. So there is a restriction, but it's quite wide. 

Most ALR screens, you might be able to see the thing at plus minus 30 degrees, sometimes usually less, where it comes down to a half-brightness angle. So we get very dark at an angle. Whereas ours actually, you can see funny enough, it's beyond 180 degrees, it gets brighter. That's steep, and it was really weird, totally not intended, but, so that's part of a little bit of the magic of our specific laminate that we've built is it has that really unique uniformity, kind of like paper, close to paper at all viewing angles left right around it.

So there's a workaround. The challenge I've seen sometimes with projection systems is that they're great except when somebody needs to get up close to it or walk by and then there's a shadow and so on. So you can let's say in a corridor, a wide hallway, or something like that, you could mount this on like a track system or something like that and project down and people could walk by without, unless they're right in front of it, they're not going to, come into the shadow there?

Chris Cavalieri: Yep. I mean, because we have that steep angle controlled on it, it can also affect bringing the projector into it. So we can have the thing off to the side. You can have it overhead. You can kind of project from steeper. So again, not quite an ultra-short throw, but that's because of the actual lensing in it. But a standard projector at a steeper angle will work quite well with that. So you have a lot of versatility and adaptability for that. Again, just making sure it's over people's heads, and by the time they block it, technically the advertisement, has done its job. So it's not too much of a concern on that front, but you can get away with quite a bit, and a lot of retail stores and public displays have lots of ceiling space to play with too. So it's very flexible there. 

Do you have to monkey with the content in terms of how it's rendered or have particular software running on the media player or whatever to make all this happen, or it's a screen and point the projector at the screen? 

Chris Cavalieri: That's why I love it because, I mean, ironically all the research we've done again, me and my colleague, both engineers, we love to keep it simple. So we've got a few projects on the go as well. Same idea, but all the software you need is the same that's already out there. It's projection mapping. Like that, nothing has changed. Nothing you learn there. If you know how to do projection mapping, or you have a team of guys who know how to do it, nothing's different. That's just content. All we do is you're putting the right projector with the right screen, and then you can see it. Simple as that. 

So I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about an installation in London in a coffee shop, and it was a black wall with a kind of chalkboard, and they were putting the menu on that instead, well, on flat panel displays and it looked pretty cool, but the coffee shop was having to dim the lights and do everything else because there are windows and doors out to the street and so on. 

If they're using your technology, do the lights have to be cranked down, drapes pulled, and all that, or it could behave as though, it is just being a regular shop?

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, that's a perfect example, and that's exactly what we want to do, and in fact, we tried to approach McDonald's, Tim Hortons, and all that, and of course, they tell me to get lost because who's Obsidian, but that's just, it is, you don't need to turn your lights on. 

Part of the founding purpose was, that Adrian, my colleague, kept tripping on everything in his classroom because he always had to turn the lights on and off and is prone to that he's always back and forth showing his slides and it's a safety risk. Even old age homes, we had approached at one point as well for they have movie theaters, they share and it's just not practical to do that, and like I said in the beginning, that's why projection isn't, and I wouldn't recommend using it in a lot of cases because if you're working as a barista and your lights are off, you can't see what you're doing. It's bad for your eye strain. If you're trying to focus look at what you're pouring, you're going to have accidents, you're going to slip, probably can't clean as effectively. And there's so many reasons you'd really need to have lights on for safety, if nothing else, and our screen will let you do that. 

Again, we've had beams of sunlight across it, still keeping the thing readable. keep your lights on. I mean, there are things you can do to play with it. It depends on the projector you use, you'd use a brighter or dimmer one. You can control the lighting as well, and we do recommend it when you can, but you don't have to be quite as aggressive when you do it. So you can keep those lights on. 

Part of the rise of the LED technology within workplaces has been the idea that in presentation theaters, big meeting rooms where more typically there's been a projector, but then the drapes are closed or a control room where the lights are very low so that you can see what's being projected on the screen.

The idea was that a DV-LED would change all that. You could open the windows up and crank the lights and everything, and you'd be able to see what's on the screen with no problem. But the challenge is cost. 

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, there's cost and there's also, I mean, with LED, do you want to see it? It's not very pleasant to look at for a long period of time.

I mean, the concept is right. All these technologies have a purpose, and I'm not discrediting the value of LEDs like outdoor displays, and billboards, I mean, they punch through light. They're very good at getting through it. They're extremely visible. They'll get your attention. But they're just not pleasant to read, if that makes sense so in terms of a boardroom yeah, it could work, and I've seen stages done with full LEDs instead of a projection screen, and it's just unpleasant. Even if you're recording it, there are aliasing effects and a lot of unpredictable things you don't really expect.

So it's one of those things that's good on paper, but in practical use is not great, and then the cost is the other end of it. So there's the cost to maintain it, install it, you have to calibrate it all those things because LEDs wear out, not no LED is the same when they come out of production, there's binning to them, all sorts of things to keep in mind.

That was our other motivator with projection. These are my famous words. You don't have to blow your budget to blow minds, right? If you do something right with the right technology that's good enough, right? You got to know what your application is, know who your audience is, who's using it, and really understand and appreciate that and Obsidian was our way to say, look, you have another option. Because light ambient light is an issue. Architects absolutely love giant windows nowadays. A funny story about a university in Ontario that got millions of dollars to renovate their classrooms, I won't name them, and big giant skylight windows without drapes, funny enough, that would let the sunrise right in that window and really make the presenter glow at the front of the classroom and which also happened to have a projection screen, which was with white and not Obsidian, and let's just say it didn't end very well, and even the another Yoko university has used projection. They've put drapes on and with those giant lights, but they're not full block-out drapes. You know, they usually let a little bit of light in. Even with the drapes closed midday cloudy day, you still couldn't read the screen. So it is a major problem and aesthetically, the rooms look beautiful. 

I mean, the architect is doing their job on that front. They're gorgeous buildings, beautifully renovated very nice aesthetics to them, but it's not functional. You need technology to overcome those challenges and to date, your only choice is to guess it is LED you either put up with it just squint or not reading it or you stick something expensive heavy bulky, and kind of blinding and you know now you can read it but you've also sort of made people uncomfortable in this space too. So you need another solution, and that's what we're hoping to do.

It's an interesting predicament for companies such as yours in that you're offering what's presented as a better option and probably far less cost. But for the companies that sell into environments like higher education, corporate, public utilities, all that sort of thing, it's not necessarily in their business interest to sell them a cost-effective, low-maintenance solution.

There's a lot more money to be made on the margin of one hell of a lot of LED and then calibration and support services and everything around it, as opposed to just selling them a display and saying, thanks, very much, call us at three years when you need a new projector. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, absolutely, and this has been driving me absolutely insane, to be honest. This projection system has existed for almost seven years now, and I still, we're still a startup. It says a lot. I mean, yes, we're engineers. We're probably terrible at sales and marketing and we are, but c’mon…

You're not the first.

Chris Cavalieri: It’s just we've approached distributors, we've gone through universities, we've thrown sales in front of them practically, and the reality is in the end, you got to go where the money's at. They want something that's predictable. The use case is the same. The installation is the same, and the training for their technicians and the customer is the same. Everything's the same because once you've got your company up and running they're not wrong. It's expensive, change is expensive and it's risky, and nowadays no one wants to take that risk. They don't want to do anything different. You know, it might be better for the customer, but. I like my margins. You know, I need my income. I got to put food on the table. I got to pay my team. 

Now, we're going to do this job because that's what we know how to do, and that's where we make money, and we understand that, and that's fine, but there's got to be someone who cares about the end user to find unique creative solutions find solutions to problems that You know, push the industry a little bit further and this has been an ongoing battle for years for us, and it drives me nuts. 

So you're absolutely right that it's a paradigm for them if they're not used to working with it. If they do, it's a white screen and they know when and where it works, and that's the end of it. There's zero reception for anything else and I hope that changes. 

I suspect there's a bit of a taint as well in that, a lot of larger environments will have used projection in the past and have the experience of going, “Well, God, I can't even see the screen properly, or anything else, so projections are off.” 

So when that gets revisited, unless you have the opportunity to have a really high-quality conversation with them, they're thinking, well, shit, I'm not doing projection again. That was a mess. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. “Oh, we have used projection before. It didn't look that good.” The customer wasn't happy. You know, we can't have that, and I mean, that's valid too. 

So is a better specifier or audience for your technology, quite possibly the architects and people who think about physical spaces and experience?

Chris Cavalieri: I think it has to be, I think those are the only people that really get the experiential side of what you can do with projection, they have the vision they can see they have a basically working towards a solution, right? They have a client who wants something unique they're left to their creative devices to develop this solution or overcome a challenge and they need all the tools in their toolbox and the actual installers, the AV text distributors, but they're not the right people to do it. They're going to do business as usual. It's gotta be the people making the design decisions who can see something greater or want to do something, and previously, let's say they couldn't, that's where proceeding could fit in.

So getting it in front of them, and that's something we're trying to do as much as we can network. That's also been challenging because these people are hard to find. I think I waited four months for a meeting at one point and met an interior design firm, and in the end, they didn't know or want to hang a TV set, so it wasn't a commercial designer, more of an interior designer, the right people are out there, and those are the people that, again, the architects, designers, those are the solution providers that really need to get their hands on this. 

It sounds like along with the physical cost of the substrate or screen or whatever you want to call it, there are really minimal additional costs in terms of a mounting system you don't need to go to the sorts of mounting systems that would be used for DBLED or LCD anything else. There's not all that metalwork, right? It's just this piece of foam that hangs on a wall, like a poster that you get foam mounted.

Chris Cavalieri: That's exactly it. That's what we tell everyone. If you hang it, you just hang it like a poster or a mirror or a print, and it's all adaptable too. Again, we do a lot of customization. So we can put the French cleat on, and hang it on your wall. What we love about that PVC foam is it's you can superglue hard points onto it from this very inexpensive and very lightweight, let's say like a 24-inch by 54-inch panel, so 4.5 feet by 2 feet, is I think about 8 kilograms, basically per panel and put a cleat onto it. We've screwed into it. We've put hooks to hang off of for summer trade shows, for portal displays. You can screw into it, you can cut it, shape it, layer it, can thicken it, or thin it, it's very versatile for the installer and whatever the application is. 

So to really get our goal, the whole vision of the city is to remove barriers, remove restrictions, and that's a mounting system we've enjoyed because it really harmonized with what we're trying to achieve lightweight. It's just no metalwork. It doesn't take weeks. It takes under an hour. You just hang it on your wall. You can butt them together. Done. Very simple. 

So you're a startup. So I assume there's not a cast of thousands working at the company? 

Chris Cavalieri: Nope. We've got two and a dog, we're very small.

I mean we've got a few people out there who are kind of advocates for us as well. So we've networked that way. We've got a really great PR guy as well who is helping us out network to the States, and Canada. He's absolutely fantastic. So we've officially the team is two, but we've got a number of people helping us. We've had some advisors we've worked with locally as well, from the university and then the forge and Hamilton as well, for example. So we've got lots of support, so we're a small team, but we're quite effective at what we do, and we've got contract manufacturers. 

We have a whole network in China if we really had to go down the road for volume production. So we see a path to mass production very quickly if and when we get to that point, but we're still two people at the moment.

Your biggest challenge is just the simple thing of awareness and finding people who get what you've got. 

Chris Cavalieri: That's it. I mean, it's spreading the message, and I mean, anyone who's done a startup knows how hard it is. Anyone who's been an engineer or even not an engineer knows how hard it is to push a product on someone. It's sort of forbidden, forbidden knowledge to do that, and we've tried and iterated our design many times. 

For example, we've made a home theater projection screen you can buy at Walmart right now. We have an adaptation of this technology for home use because during COVID everyone was at home. No one's putting signs in. I mean, we're very adaptable, flexible, and I mean, that's the benefit of being a very small, but creative, dynamic team is you can do these things we have the technology, we have to know how to do it and frankly, we love design and we love creative challenges. So that's something we do and we'll continue to do. 

Are there any sort of caps on resolution or anything like that? Like, I don't really understand screen technology. If somebody has a 4k output, that's what's on there, that doesn't really matter. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. So the resolution is all just coming from the projector itself. So it depends on the projector you choose. I'd say the only limitation, people listing stuff as like a 4k projection screen is just. Throwing jargon at you to make it sound cool. It's, plastic. It'll be stretch vinyl or painted vinyl. The only thing that might affect your resolution in general is if the screen has a high texture in it. So sometimes there are some optical screens for an ultra-short throw, for example depending on the size of those you might see speckling or something at a certain resolution.

That's the only thing I can think of you could justify putting a resolution to a screen, but we don't have that.. 

So if people wanna know more, where do they find you online? 

Chris Cavalieri: So I mean, you can dig me up on LinkedIn, but obsidianscreens.com would be a good starting place. Shoot me an email, and then my name's Chris Cavalieri, should be on the screens look me up on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. We got Facebook, we got YouTube, you name it. So save screen technologies wherever you can find them. 

All right, well thank you for your time. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dave. It's great to talk with you, and I hope we'll get to see you soon. Well, 

We'll see what I can do. 

Chris Cavalieri: I'll show it off. I hope all my words live up to it in person.

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

LED video wall technology is now so pervasive, and there are soooo many vendors, that it is increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate and compete.

That's compounded by a lot of manufacturers selling on specs like pixel pitch, and the form factor of their products. Very few, however, spend much if any time talking about the why and what of video wall projects - as in why is this project being considered, what's it for, and also what's going to be on the screen when it gets plugged in.

So I was intrigued when I was in touch with Chanan Averbuch, a South Florida LED industry vet. I learned he'd left his longtime executive sales gig with an LED display vendor to join a spinout that makes premium LED displays, but leads with creative.

The company is called Blue Square X - with the X being short for experience. While most manufacturers just make the stuff, and ship it to integrators, Blue Square plans to bridge a couple of gaps - acting as consultants and producing creative for digital experiences ... with integrator partners doing the final install.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Chanan, thank you for joining me. We've traded messages on LinkedIn and everything else and as we were saying before I turned on the recording, we probably had a brush by, “Hey, how are you doing?” I think at some trade show, but we haven't chatted at length. Can you tell me what your company Blue Square X does, because I'm unfamiliar. 

Chanan Averbuch: Sure. Blue Square, I guess you could more or less call it the parent company has been in business for over 10 years. But Blue Sqaure X is a relatively new venture, leveraging more of my background and my partner's background in the space, and inside Blue Sqaure X, I'm focused on the innovation side more so than anything else.

So Blue Square X is displays that are 90 inches and larger on the LCD side, and on the LED side, everything from, 110 inches all the way to unlimited sizes. We have projects we're doing that are a hundred-foot-long LED walls and 40 feet high, concave, convex, curved, all that stuff. 

But Blue Square X at the end of the day is not another led company. We're focused on the experience first, which means content first, software second, and LED third. 

Yeah, which is quite different because, through the years I've had no end of companies, relate stories about how they sold big LED displays, had them installed and then the customer would look at them and say, “This is great, what should we put on the screen?” like an afterthought. 

Chanan Averbuch: I've gotten that over the years, time and time again, somebody will have the brain fart of, “Wow, it would be really cool if we did a sports bar instead of a bunch of TVs, let's do LED.” Okay, and then two weeks before the grand opening, “Wait, what are we doing on this thing from 8 am to 4 pm when we're not watching sports games when there's no live sports?” So we did digital art in those spaces. 

So you're, the terminology I use is, a solutions provider in that you're not a pure play integrator because an integrator doesn't tend to think about content or experience so much. There's the odd one that does, but for the most part, we put together the projects we deploy, maybe we manage them, but we don't really think that much about what's on the screen.

Chanan Averbuch: Spot on. I think one of the key issues that I've experienced over almost the last two decades in the AV industry is that most of the channel has thought about how to move a box and has never really thought about what the client is trying to feel from an emotional perspective in a space. 

What are they trying to create when someone walks into a space, when they leave a space, how do they want them to feel?

I think in the era now where you're trying to get employees to come back to work, right? It doesn't matter if you're in the US, on the Democratic side or the Republican side, it doesn't make a real difference. If you want employees to come back to work, you have to give them a compelling reason for what it feels like when you come to the office beyond the barista, the coffee bar, and the cereal crap, you gotta have more of an experience too, oh my gosh, I love going to the office. It makes me feel a certain way, and that's where experience matters. 

Do you find that many end users have their heads around what they want to do?

Because I know from my consulting experience that I will ask customers what they want to do and why, and quite often they'll lean back in their chairs and think, I haven't really thought about that. 

Chanan Averbuch: To be brutally honest with you, what was always my struggle for the last 13 years is trying to get people to understand what to try to make a space feel like, and I've been blessed in the early days now in Blue Square X, when we, in a very stealth mode, went to market, our first projects were actually luxury retail and it's not luxury retail where you would historically imagine where they have a big TV or big LED wall. It's now digital art being built. In an immersive space within luxury retail, there are several stores that we're going to be coming to live with soon with some beautiful case studies, very similar to what we're seeing in the real estate market. 

We have a bunch of case studies about to come to market now as well for a luxury real estate sales center. So when someone launches a $100M or $2B project, they want to sell units fast. So having a projector in a sales center doesn't quite do it, but having an immersive theater and immersive LED wall with custom content where it looks like the waves are coming at you and things of that nature in a real way, not the 3D naked eye stuff. I'm talking about the real anamorphic content where it feels like you're buying into a lifestyle. When you're able to translate that, condo sales come along with it. 

Quite often, I've also found that those customers who understand that kind of thinking, then have their heads snapped back when they start to understand the cost of doing that.

Is there a lot of work in getting them over the line or do they just understand that this is a $100M development, yes, we're going to spend $250,000 on content or whatever the number is. 

Chanan Averbuch: So it's funny that you say that because I think when I was personally going through my own journey and starting in this space, it was hard for me to explain that value, right? The good thing is, that we've already done in a very short period of time, some of these unique experiences where we're able to talk about the cost of capital, and the return on their capital, because in the world of real estate, for example, it's all about return on your investment. And they have interest payments in addition to principal payments that they owe to the bank. So the faster they sell units. The less they owe the bank. 

So because we're focused more on the luxury and premium side, and they, I guess you could say the true experiential environments, the price is not necessarily as much of an issue. As the expression goes, price is only an issue in the absence of value, but because we're not trying to sell an LED screen. We're talking about the experience, we're talking about the content first, the software, how to get it there, and the LEDs, how you display it. It's a different conversation that we're having. We're talking usually to the marketing folks. We're talking to the innovation people. We're talking to the people who say, how am I going to get my ROI?

And it's very easy to map that out, and that applies in luxury retail. That applies in real estate, and even because we're focused on the channel still looking with larger AV integrators, we're working with the AV integrators to help translate that value into how it's going to pan out and what it's going to do for their consumer or their buyers, whoever it is in their environments.

So when you say you're working with the AV integrators, you wouldn't describe yourself as an integrator that's competing with them for business but as more of a partner? 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. So, thank God I've been very blessed with working with the AV channel to do control rooms, do experiential environments. That still has not changed for me. The only real difference in what we're doing in Blue Square X is that we are being engaged directly with the sports teams, we're being engaged directly with the architect or the interior designer, and then they'll say, who can execute this with us in addition to the Blue Square X pro services team, right?

We don't run data cables. We don't run power. We don't put pressure on systems. That's not our business. We're not pretending to be an AV integrator. We're still going to be partnering with the AVI SPLs or the AVI Systems or the Diverifieds of the world, et cetera. 

Okay. So you would quite possibly maybe own the customer, so to speak, but you're not doing the whole solution stack, you're gonna sub a partner with, I don't know, pull a name out, AVI, SPL, or whoever it may be. 

Chanan Averbuch: Yeah, and I think there's a huge value added to that too, because not just because they have 5 employees, it's because, oftentimes when I would historically get a call in, my previous job, it was, “something's not working”. Well, screens are usually pretty dumb, right? If the playback is not working, that may be a different story, or it's often like a hiccup in the crash drone or whatever the control system may be, and having that first line of defense as an integrator who's down the block, perhaps. It's a lot more valuable for me than to ship my team to Brazil, ship my team to Korea, or ship my team to Qatar.

You mentioned your previous work and experience and so on. I was aware of you when you were working for an LED company. What is your background in this industry? 

Chanan Averbuch: So I really started 13+ years ago with Primeview, and there I started as a Regional Sales Manager, then Business Development Manager, then VP, then SVP, then EVP.

I was initially just trying to provide for my family. I guess it was like, it was a trunk slammer or whoever it may be. I tried to do business with you when I first started. I just had to put numbers on, and then as things evolved in 2017 and coming to 2018, I was able to pioneer the all-in-one space back in 2018 out of a sheer lack of resources, to be honest with you, on an engineering side. It was funny how that evolved. But the all-in-one category is something that, I'm very pleased to say, had some of my first, with Microsoft, with Citigroup, and some really substantial clients, and then as that all-in-one category evolved and from indoor to outdoor to 32:9, that's when all of a sudden I started realizing, wait when we get out of the 16:9, what happens to the content? How does that work? And that sort of just blew my mind, this whole content space, and I started developing that further, and that thesis when working closely with digital artists, and I have some amazing projects that are about to go live now within Blue Square X, where a lot of times we're getting pulled into projects where we're not even involved in the LED.

We're not even evolving the playback. We're just doing the content, and if I could quote one of my great friends in the industry, Britton Gates from Newcomb and Boyd, he always asked me previously, and we're going to be doing this now: if there are so many people out there that could use help, Even if you're not doing the lead, are you willing to do that? And the short answer is yes. I want to help people create experiences, even if They're not buying our LED today. 

Yeah, you could make the argument that the content side of the business is more interesting and easier on a company just because you're not having to worry about shipping and everything else associated with the hard technology.

Chanan Averbuch: Oh, a hundred percent. I think the same line of logic would imply that if it's an inferior quality LED, and it's just like another OEM, it could also make my content look bad. So I can take from personal example, I was traveling this past week for a very high-end install that our team was doing, and in part of the travels, I remember going through the journey of talking about what the content is, and once we figured out that it had to be not SDR, but HDR, our team had to get on a frantic and run 32 cables instead of 16, right? So talking through the content strategy early on also impacts infrastructure, not just hardware, really.

I anticipate that almost everything that you're going to see from 2024 and beyond is going to be HDR on the experiential side. Everything, because the blacks and the grays, it's day and night. 

And what does that mean for existing deployments out there? 

Is HDR backward-compatible, so to speak, or do you either have an HDR display or you don't?

Chanan Averbuch: Good question. I think when you think back two years ago when people started really talking about HDR on the commercial side, not consumer, but on the commercial side, I think you had people talking about HDR, talking about what they call HDR-ready. This means some of the components can potentially work with HDR, but to go and truly retrofit or change the hardware to now be able to be HDR is not as simple as one may think, even though the marketing materials on that spec may have said previously HDR-ready, it's not truly HDR.

So I think in reality, retrofitting certain sites to be HDR is going to be difficult. I think they're gonna have to understand that SDR is what they bought and it's either they upgrade all their hardware to go and be able to truly be compatible with HDR or they're gonna have to just settle and stick to SDR today, as sad as that may be.

What would that mean? It's not like SDR is going to look bad. It's just HDR is going to look really good. 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. I think even if you look at consumer playback devices as simple as an Apple TV, right? Even Apple TV today is HDR-ready, and it really can play back HDR, but like we're doing now a significant amount of work in the home theater business, it’s not a business that I was actually pursuing, and I'm now seeing these massive home theater projects with commercial integrators. Yes, they're residential integrators, but they're sometimes bigger than commercial projects, these home theaters. 

I had to go down the rabbit hole of what a Kaleidoscope is and what real HDR playback is and cinema-quality playback. So really only once you're in this space and focused on delivering the high-end quality do you understand all these little peripheral devices for playback and content are so significant in the ecosystem. But unless you're in it, you don't know it. 

One of the things that I concluded walking around ISE at the front of the year, and then Ifocomm again, was that the LED display market has matured to a point where just about everything looks really good. Yes, some companies come over from China with, purposefully, low-cost, material that looks crappy, even when it's optimized on our trade show floor. But in general, the stuff all looks really good. It's all sub one mil now and everything else. Have we hit the peak of this? Where does it go? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So I think to your point, I think when you talk about what's market has called mini-LED or COB or some of these more standard technologies today, the COB at a 0.7 look really freaking good. But even within those LEDs, the differentiator between HDR and really great quality scan rates that what I would say is considered broadcast quality or production quality or luxury retail quality, there's a differentiator in the market at that point, because one is good enough, and the other one is truly providing a higher level of experience, and what that means is the quality of the components. 

So on a simple level, you have Nova Star, A6, A8, A10, et cetera, right? You have all the different Nova Star receiving cards, for example. The different receiving cards produce different quality results and have a higher level of spec. That's definitely the case for the mass market. I think there are ways to build materials to change things, and then there are also certain instances where having a higher brightness panel or LED bulb is great. Sometimes it's not good. You have to know the real application because it generates different heat. But in that instance, we've gotten certain projects now in the last few months where having a higher nit bulb helped. We have instances where they wanted a lower nit bulb because they wanted to not have to redo their infrastructure and energy and power, right? So they were repurposing LCD and they wanted to stay with LEDs and if they had gone with a higher bulb, they would have had the max power draws where you require more power. 

But on the evolution of LED itself, COG, chip on glass, that's something that's going to be coming out soon. There are some other new things within the LED world we're about to be launching a product that's almost like an x-ray where you're able to print patterns on an LED and shine through it, but at a high resolution, not low resolution like you see on the market today. So there are definitely innovative ways of producing technology where just imagine a Calcutta marble, finish backdrop, and we print that Calcutta marble on a physical LED, and you're able to still protrude through it with a high brightness bulb LED.

So there's a lot of these technologies that are about to come to market that we're working on, but it's from an innovative standpoint, not everyone else is doing it. How do we just be cheaper? It's what's the experience that we're trying to create, and then how do we solve that in a way that has never been done before.

So when you talk about chip on glass, are you talking about micro LEDs? 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. 

That is a horribly abused and misused term. 

Chanan Averbuch: Yep. I try to shy away from the specifics of talking about COB GOB or SMD. I honestly try to focus on what's your environment, what are you trying to do? I'm fixing other people's problems now, just not on the content, but where someone sold SMD in a public space that should have been COB and in other environments where it should have been GOB to pretty protective solution. Like I just saw a curved LED that was so chewed up, I told the end user, you may consider replacing it completely. And he goes, with what? I said with a glue-on-board version, because otherwise you have to protect this thing, because it'll look like crap. 

Through the years, I have seen some SMD stuff in public spaces and I thought, what in God's name were you thinking? Did you somehow magically believe that nobody was going to scrape this thing? 

Chanan Averbuch: But in truth, it's not just about specifying the wrong technology. A lot of things that we're doing now at Blue Square X is because we realize other people didn't do it, and it's not just about the content or the software side. It's also about the trim kit the cladding and the framing. For example, one of my friends I was talking to at Leon Speakers, where we talked about the idea of hashtag framing every TV. 

The idea of framing every TV is not just so that it looks aesthetically pleasing in a residential environment or in your conference room. It's also to protect it to a large extent. So when I think about framing, there was a project recently, it was comical that we recently lost ironically. And I thought it was great that we lost it. My partner was like, what do you mean we've lost it? I said I'm so happy we lost it. He goes, why? I said because the other guy is putting a product that's going to get destroyed in this environment because there are no protective elements in the backside, and it's IP-65 front-rated. IP-54 in the back and they're putting this in the harshest environment, humanly possible. I'm happy that my name's not on that.

So framing every TV, trim kit, cladding, mounting, and protecting the LED is equally as important as the technology that you're going to use. But people don't think about those things. I want to get the project. I want the box. That's not smart business 

I wonder if the market is now at a point where it's like buying a high-end vehicle in that the salesperson can go on and on about what's under the hood and the typical buyer just doesn't care and in the same way, they don't care really whether it's COB or what controller is used or any of that stuff. 

They just want to know how good is it going to look, does it suits my needs and what's the budget. 

Chanan Averbuch: So I think you're definitely getting more to the commoditized point of the marketplace, which is where I think you're going to see several players disappear. It's already starting to happen. Hence the reason why I've always focused more on what it's supposed to create and what it's supposed to feel like, how much you're supposed to be immersed, which is why it's content first, software second, LED third in our world, and then trim kit, cladding, framing to follow for that same reason.

It really comes down to how do you not just differentiate yourself, but how do you actually demonstrate that difference. Having the right content obviously helps, having the right software helps, having the right LED helps, but one of the things that we're going to be investing heavily in on a national level to start within the US with Miami, then New York, then Chicago, Austin, then LA is physical experience centers throughout the US and that will be going global as well in the near future. 

What I'd like to do is when a client from a sports team a luxury retailer or a real estate developer, whatever it may be, wants to see the product, Yes, I could do a Zoom. I can do a Microsoft team, whatever it may be, but I will, on my dime, fly you into one of my experience centers on my dime and I am a hundred percent confident that the tech stack between the content, the software, and the lead will be noticeably different when you come to the experience centers, noticeably, it'll be a finished product, a true turnkey, a real solution. 

Now, the devil's advocate side of that, if I'm a buyer, this is a highly controlled environment where you're able to think about everything ahead of my visit and optimize the whole nine yards versus operating in the real world where power can be shaky. There's public, there's ambient lighting, and everything else that can play into it. How do you counterbalance people like me who walk in and say, yeah, but… 

Chanan Averbuch: Great example, I just spent $20,000 to do a massive outdoor demo for one of our clients, and we did the demo at one o'clock in the afternoon at the harshest moment, exactly where the sun was hitting strongest.

And you explained that? 

Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah, and he intentionally chose the spot, that was the harshest spot, where it's direct sunlight. I'm like, gentlemen, how do you think this looks? And they told me how it looked and they were pleased, obviously, I said, this is the worst it's ever going to look. He goes, what? He didn't understand what I meant. I'm like, you chose the most sun exposure, like the worst. If you think this looks good, it only gets better from here, and I explained to them why, and they're like, got it. But I spent $20,000 on that demo to do it the right way.

So I agree with your thesis and what you're saying about that in a controlled environment, but with that said, in our experience centers in our showrooms, we have a complete AV system, multiple sources, multiple HDR sources, and multiple cable TV boxes. I could show four cable TV boxes. So if a Sports Park comes in here, like Dave and Busters, I could demonstrate that. If it's a home theater, I could show it with surround sound, Dolby quality, as well as HDR with the collide escape. I could show. Exactly in an indoor environment. Yes, but outdoors? Absolutely. There are environments where you have to put it outdoors and do the real stress test. No question. 

So if you're going to market as an LED manufacturer and your marketing focus is on: here are all of our technical specs for all of our different pixel pitches and this and that, and basically blind the person at the other end, the buyer with all of this flurry of buzzwords and jargon, does that work anymore? It strikes me that the LED market is now somewhat commoditized. 

Chanan Averbuch: So frankly, you're a hundred percent correct. I'm not focused on the tech specs of the LED whatever. 

Does the customer care about it? 

Chanan Averbuch: I think there are some exceptions in the market. There's an artist that I'm working with who really understands the technical spectrum. They understand color parameters. They understand DCI like some of them understand this stuff, but that's like the 1%. But the 1%loves us because we're able to produce, and deliver those exact results. 

But to your point, the conversations we're having are very different in the sense that for example, we just closed a deal with a major sports team. They originally wanted a 3:3 LCD. I said to them, I'll work with you on pricing to get you to the LED world. Because I know for a fact, the LCD is the wrong approach for your application. You're going to be doing spreadsheets, and you have a bezel in between, and now bear in mind, that Blue Square, the parent company, has a ton of LCD business that we do with Samsung, right? On Blue Square X, we want to make sure that if the requirement is there to do an LED, then it should be there, and the reason why we're able to successfully take a 3:3 or 4:4 and turn it into a lead project is that we're asking the right questions. We're educating, not just the marketing person, not just the facilities director, not just the branding team, but everyone along the way is saying: Where's your seat? Where's the closest viewer? What's your content strategy? We're not asking about the LED. We're talking about what the actual application is.

Because you're right, in a commoditized environment, what's the difference between the first 30 Google searches they come up with an LED? It's hard to differentiate. But those other 30 companies are not asking those questions. They don't want to. They just want to move boxes. 

Yeah, they just want to know how much wall space there is.

Chanan Averbuch: That's it. But they're not asking about content playback. They're not asking if have you partnered with Novari, or do you have experience with with Samsung's MagicInfo. They're not asking the right questions because that requires education and training, that requires industry experience. 

Now with Blue Square X, do you have preferred manufacturing partners or are you getting your own led custom manufactured by white label or how does that end of it work? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So we are day one, day two, and day a hundred, and from here on out, focus on the premium side. So nothing that's off the shelf in the market is of interest to us. Nothing that exists today on the LED production line is of interest whatsoever. 

We are designing specs for the higher end of the spectrum. That's where we want to be. So our LED partners are not people I've worked with in my previous role or others, it’s, I would say, the higher-end side of specs and therefore we are designing to our needs from day one. So it's definitely custom spec to something that's not available to the mass market. 

So does that mean you're doing the technical design over in the United States and then getting it a contract manufactured by a high-end production line, probably in China or Taiwan?

Chanan Averbuch: And Mexico as well. Yeah. 

Oh really, in Mexico? 

Chanan Averbuch: For TAE purposes. It is a market for governments as well. 

Interesting, and on the Mexico side, is it final assembly or are they manufacturing the LED? 

Chanan Averbuch: So there is some manufacturing done here, and assembly. So there are certain components, obviously, that don't make financial sense to do complete production here. It really depends on what the next president of the United States looks like because I think that'll determine some of the taxation side of things and how tariffs come into play. So we're just ultimately preparing for the doomsday scenario and the ideal scenario simultaneously.

How do you deal with the cost end of it? It sounds like you're going after premium clients, is cost not as big an issue if you can, as you said much earlier on, really go after the ROI model and what the real benefits are? 

Chanan Averbuch: While I definitely believe in my heart of hearts, price is only an issue in the absence of value, at the end of the day, the clients that we're talking to understand that there's a way to hit something that should be a $100 and pay $60, and there's a way that if you get the $60 solution, it's not going to look or perform like a $100 product either. We communicate the values of both extremes.

Like we'll go and say to the customer, if you want to get this $100 solution, I don't feel comfortable giving you the $60 solution. But if you only have the $60 solutions, this is what it looks like, and what we'll try to do is we'll offer the financing option as an OPEX model so that they don't have to get to that, I don't want to say it, but the crappier option, the lesser quality. We'll gladly take the OPEX model and work with them so that way it fits within their budget because I wouldn't want a lesser experience for myself. Why would I want that for my clients? 

Is that an increasing demand these days? Can you help with the financing on this? 

Chanan Averbuch: So, I think it's coming up more. Is it actually translating to the numbers or percentages that I thought? No, they're not, but it's evolving and growing in the markets. I'll give you an example. If someone is in the car wash industry, okay, and they're used to doing static signage, and now they're trying digital to jump from zero digital CapEx expense to spending half a million dollars. It's hard to get approvals for, but now if you break that down to $5,000 a month or $8,000 a month over three years, whatever it may be, all of a sudden it looks a lot more palatable. 

So I think it depends where the organization, where the institution, and where the non-profit is in their experience with digital and how their internal approval process works.

Now there's a harsh environment, car washes. 

Chanan Averbuch: Oh, it's so much fun. So much fun. We went to the car wash show in Nashville and I'll tell you the most amazing thing that I discovered. There's people like you alluded to that get it and they realize it, and there's people that don't. The ones that get it realize I can't buy crap, right? I can't buy inferior quality. The ones that don't get it, get burnt usually. So I wish them only the best. 

Tell me about the company. Where is it based? 

Chanan Averbuch: Blue Square X is based in South Florida. Home of no state income tax here in Miami, and the market is actually a bit on fire here on a regional level where others say the real estate markets are slowing down, Central Florida, Northern Florida, and South Florida has not slowed down just even a bit. Velocity here is amazing. This is our home base for us but we're about to finalize a few other locations here in the US as we speak. 

What's the size of the company, both, Parent and, just the X side?

Chanan Averbuch: Under 20 employees currently at this moment, but we're hiring and growing rapidly. 

For Blue Square X? 

Chanan Averbuch: Yep.

And for Blue Square itself? 

Chanan Averbuch: So it's hard to say right now because some of the resources are shared at the moment. But that's obviously been a change from the install professional services and the creative side, again, we're very focused on the creative side more so than anything else. 

But one of the partners also is very strong in the rental and staging business and has a whole plethora of warehousing and service support models throughout the US so we have that extra tier of support from one of the partners.

All right, and where can they find the company online? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. If someone wants to reach out to me directly, you could definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. As for the latest to the company, it's bluesqx.com and you'll be seeing some of the press releases coming up about it I really look forward to engaging with customers.

I know people get scared a little bit when we talk about premium, they assume it's price. It's all about the experience, and if you work your way backward through the experience, then everything else that seemingly doesn't matter matters now. 

And the clientele you're going after would tend to understand that more than maybe a certain car wash operator.

Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah. But as you alluded to, the ROI is there if you're trying to evoke an emotion or an experience, that's what we care about. We want people to walk away from a retail experience, from a school, from a broadcast studio, from a control room, from a real estate and say, holy cow, how did you see that? It has to be Instagrammable. It has to be something that creates that wow moment. We want to create those wow moments. 

All right. Thank you for having the time or taking the time to chat with me. 

Chanan Averbuch: Absolutely. God bless, and thanks again for your time as well.

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

Feeding the content beast is an endless challenge for most companies who have invested in digital signage technology for their venues, particularly when the messaging mission is not data and pricing, but material that informs, educates and generally occupies the time of viewers.

There are a few companies out there with suites of free streaming content channels, curated and sorted by interest areas. But free means ad-supported. So the action channel a bar owner might have up on screens has digital OOH ads, just like linear TV.

A start-up called Stream is coming at this from a different angle, producing custom content that looks like cable TV news channels and is sorted by interest areas, like channels for medical and dental offices. The big differences are no ads and low-cost monthly subscription fees. The service puts people on screens, but AI is also used to what Stream calls augment the videos.

Started just a year ago and just coming out of side hustle/stealth mode, the founders are going after what they say is a gap in the market for this type and style of content. But in meeting with prospective customers, they've also uncovered hidden demand for private label TV channels for larger clients.

I chatted recently with co-founder Anthony Nerantzis.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Anthony, thank you for joining me. I knew nothing about your company, Stream, until the other day I got an email, I looked at it and I thought, this is interesting, who are these guys? And I asked a couple of questions and concluded that perhaps we should have a chat. Can you give me a rundown of what you do?

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on your program. A big fan. My name is Anthony Nerantzis, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Stream. Stream is in a unique space and we think of a new space in the digital signage industry. 

What we're doing is producing really premium, but low-cost and customized content solutions for CMSs, network operators, and so on to put what is a premium content product and deliver premium content product to their end users. Our whole content model is based around on unique streaming channels. So we have both plug and play, but also these white-label custom channels that we produce for brands and organizations that want to get their messages out in a contextual way to drive engagement with their customers and their viewers and we're really excited about it. 

So if I'm looking at one of your content channels, what does it look like? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah. So what we did is the founders of Stream come from media and comms backgrounds. So what we’re the best at is telling stories, visual storytelling, narrative storytelling, audience engagement, and what we identified is that a broadcast news look and feel with a host, with that graphic representation of messages, people are drawn to that. People want to engage with that sort of content. It's a premium, high-level content, think ESPN or CNN. So all of our content is based around that broadcast news style, look and feel. 

What we do is for different, contextual environments, different venues, we create content that's relevant to those venues. Think of a broadcast news channel for a doctor's office. Think of a broadcast news channel for the C-Store. It's really contextually relevant content for those different environments, and it's delivered in that nice look and feel of a news broadcast. 

So it's audio-driven?

Anthony Nerantzis: We do offer audio solutions, but what we've found for the digital out-of-home environment, typically, there is no audio, and that's for a few reasons. First, our file sizes, just as far as the handshake and the transfer, with our partners, a smaller file size, easier to transfer, easier to upload. But second of all, a lot of the end users that we've worked with, especially on the white-label channel side, don't want noise pollution in their environments. They're just looking for that visual component. So that's where our focus is. 

We obviously do audio, but our bread and butter is, that visual aspect, brilliant visuals, that draw people in.

So if it looks like broadcast news, is there a reporter or a host or whatever you want to call it, on-air talent, talking, but you subtitle it or is it more visuals with supporting, titles or captions? 

Anthony Nerantzis: It's a great combo of both. So we do have our lineup of Stream hosts that we utilize for our production and our development and then they do appear on the screens, and yes, with a subtitle delivery of those messages, but we have graphics of messages, headlines, subheads.

You wouldn't turn our broadcast stations on your TV after a long day and sit down on the couch, but if you were to do that, it does appear as if it were a CNN, ESPN, or Fox News sort of broadcast look and feel. 

That sounds expensive. I mean with on-air talent and everything else and the news resources that you need for that, having some experience in that in my old newspaper days and everything else, and there's a little bit of rxperience with broadcasting. On-air talent and everything else costs real money. How do you get around that?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. So, as I said, we come from the media and the comms space. So we do have that production value, that know-how of the space. What we've done is we've integrated some neat, really revolutionary, AI augmentation, to our displays and the content. So not only does that accelerate. our production process but it also helps us keep our costs, you know in check And allows us to provide what is really low-cost content to our end customers. 

Obviously right now we're priced to scale. it's not cheap but we're excited, you know comparatively to a lot of the other options content out there. We're able to come in comparably, if not in a lot of cases lower, but still delivering a premium product. 

Are these AI avatars, are they generated hosts as opposed to real on-air talent? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So not generated. So we call it augmented because they are our host, they're on payroll and we work with them for a number of different creative, creative situations and use cases. But yeah, so one of the ways that we're really able to within our tech stack drive our costs down is  through the rendering process. Again, augmenting our hosts rather than it's not what we're doing is not fake or avatar generated in that capacity, but we are using our, real life host talent and then using them as AI generated through and to deliver them across our streaming channels. 

It sounds like there's two ways to go at this, the standard sorts of channels that you already have, and there are custom channels. If it's a standard channel that's going into a doctor's office, what am I subscribing to? What roughly am I going to pay? I'm sure there's and it depends on there, but, also just what's the refresh cycle? Is this something that's refreshed daily, weekly, monthly? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So I think a doctor's office is a really great example of where we show up in a way that current content options aren't quite there.

What we're doing, I would say on the plug and play side, we have several channels. We have Med One, which is a catch all healthcare sort of channel of healthcare infotainment, and then we also have a dentistry channel, and then we also have a dermatology channel and we're looking at other avenues for other use cases within the medical field.

But what these are doing is they're showing really interesting infotainment content that's relevant to those spaces. We like to say contextually relevant. They're sharing news from around the industry, news from across the health landscape across the US. It's all G-rated. We use the four year old test. If you're a mom in a waiting room, what would you be comfortable with your four year old seeing? So it's not gory.

It's just health tips and interesting stuff. That's going on studies hey a new study came out that lifting weights after 60 is good for bone density, things like that, and then our custom channels, if you are a bigger network and you own a network of, several hundred screens across, dentists office, we can really get really custom on that white label space with corporate branding, corporate messaging, and really for those brands, taking the exact messages that they want to deliver to their customers in that really unique five to ten minute waiting room experience, and getting them off their phones and having them focus on the screens, with relevant content.

As far as pricing goes, that's where we're really excited and probably most proud. So for our venue channels, that's our kind of our second tier. Those really environment specific channels such as healthcare, those can MSRP run anywhere from $10 at the high-end and $5 at the low end. So compared to what it would cost for a CNN Health with through a cable subscription, it's really nice, it's obviously a fraction of that. But it's also a step above rotating PowerPoint slides, with messages that say, “Go get your flu shot”, which after the third or fourth flip, people are tuning out. 

From a cost perspective, it's extremely competitive. And then the white label channels, that's also really exciting for us because we're able to deliver those brand specific channels at a really affordable cost. 

I suspect that's definitely a “it depends” thing on how much they want and everything else. But if you had a typical, private label channel, would that be like a hundred bucks a month a thousand bucks a month?

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question So it depends on the end point and you got me with “it depends.” It does depend but for now, i'll give you an example. We have a network with a hundred end points and that they ask for a white label channel and you know with regular updates, it's not daily updates, but with regular updates, we're able to deliver that at 50 bucks an end point so considering the value that you're getting, the brand itself is getting their very own broadcast news channel. 

When our CMS partners put us in front of these folks, and they say, hey, this is something new, this is something exciting and you can have your own broadcast news channel. The end users are thrilled. Going from rotating powerpoint slides to something like this is such a value add as far as customer engagement. We've really found an enthusiasm for that sort of new age content. 

Are there personalization options out of those private label ones?

In other words, can the dental office in Cincinnati versus the one in Cleveland inject their own kind of messaging like, “Please welcome our new hygienist, Sarah” or whatever?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and it's actually funny you say that because the network that I just mentioned previously, they have a network of doctor's offices across the state of North Carolina, and each one of those offices has their own little, news, notes, updates, awards that they want to highlight that maybe might not be appropriate to share across. Someone in Winston, Salem might not care about what's going on in Carova, so we can make it really specific based on the location, obviously at scale, but yeah, we can get really granular as far as how tailored we can make it to each specific location.

This is different from the streaming channels that companies that I see out there like Atmosphere and Loop and that. Those exist for the purposes of having content supported by advertising. You're not doing advertising at all, are you? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a really great point, and no, you're right. We are not doing advertising.

We are all about content forward, grabbing that audience's attention and giving them the content rather than diluting it with ads. I think that we're different, from that fast TV space in a few ways, very low cost subscription model, not ads. We're not necessarily a walled garden. We work with CMSs and we work with operators and distributors as a puzzle piece to what they're doing and really being allies to them so they can go in to their partners and their end users and say, we have this really cool puzzle pieces that we can fit within our system. So we're trying to be allies in that way. We don't have a player we're not a walled garden and then I would just say third of all we are at the end of the day, we're producing that premium content. We're not licensing it from other folks so we can control that messaging. 

We can control what's showing up on the screens, make sure it's G-rated, make sure what these brands want in their locations and environments and venues is really tailored to them, not a lowest common denominator loop-based sort of system. 

So you've got a content team that's paying attention to the news wires and just the general run of news out there as well as press releases and everything else, industry reports and so on to pull together your stuff?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and that's really our strength. Our team, the founders specifically, we come from some of the biggest media and comms companies in the world. So we understand that space. That's where we think our biggest value is, yes, tracking the news, but also identifying these brands and organizations.

What are the best messages to connect with your core audiences? How do we drive this forward? Especially infotainment, but also in a retail media space where it's about conversions, driving action. That's our specialty and that's where we've been really able to flex our value with our current client book.

You mentioned, you work with CMS companies as opposed to them. How does your stuff plug in?

Anthony Nerantzis: CMSs are our best friends. If there's a North star for us, it's really being partners with the CMS is because they're so powerful in the sense that they have the distribution, they have these relationships and they know what their customers want.

So when we talk about integration, we are coming to them in two ways. First, a simple integration of our plug and play apps within their app store. So when a customer has their interface template up, they can plop us in, and then our content is really seamless. The handshake is very seamless between us, and then our content can show up on their screens.

Is it streamed straight from your servers or the host that you use for streaming or are the CMS getting a file and it's stored locally on the player? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. How it typically works is that HTML5 is our best friend. We provide the content feeds through that, they plug into the CMSs, and then the CMS from there distributes that URL through their app store.

So when someone selects us out of their app store, it plugs in basically they're given access to the license through the URL. We can get as simple as we've had clients come to us. End users specifically if we're working right with the end user and they're like, we just want an mp4 file, so we'll just drop an mp4 file in there in their Dropbox and they plug it into their CMS template and they're off and running. We pride ourselves on universal connectivity. We'll meet you where the customer is 

So if you have an end user who says I don't want a CMS. I don't want that additional monthly cost or whatever. Can I work just directly with you? Can they do that? 

Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, our most important ally in the space are these CMSs. So we respect that relationship. So if we're working with a CMS and there would never be a situation where the client would be like, see you later, CMS, we're just going to plug in the stream. We value our long term relationships more than any sort of, short term gain of an individual network.

And then beyond that, and this came up the other day, we're working with the CMS and their client has a few dozen screens and there might be a few hundred other screens on the horizon in the next few months. We make very clear, we were brought onto the project by the CMS. We're not going to expand past the boundaries of where their players are plugged in. We respect those relationships and I think that's really the key to our success. 

Yeah, and I think the end user community, if you want to call it that, is also more knowledgeable than they were for a good long time, where they understand that having a proper content management system with device management, monitoring, all those other things, the ability to scale and all that are really important versus just, finding some server player that can call a URL.

Anthony Nerantzis: A hundred percent and I think that's what we're recognizing, and we really can only go as far as our CMS partners, media players. We're not going to give individual URL feeds to a thousand screens. We rely on them for that distribution. 

Maybe my mind blanked or something, but did you talk about the typical frequency of content changes? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. So for our flagships, our news and sports, obviously that's quick hitting news and that needs to be updated throughout the day, which it is. 

For our venue channels, those are mostly environments, for example, a doctor's office, you might really only be in a doctor's office once every six months, and you'd think that we'd say, we just need to update those channels every six months. What we really go for is, perception is everything. So if that venue owner isn't seeing it updated that often, they're going to think they're not connecting those dots. We're there to connect those dots for them. We're there to consistently fresh content. So when they're walking into their place of business, they're not like, wow, this is the same thing that was playing two weeks ago. So for our venue channels, we do updates at least two or three times a week to keep that content fresh, relevant. 

Our biggest fear is stale content. That's what we want to get rid of. That's what we want to move past and we want to show up well for our CMS partners that their end users are happy with the content that's being displayed. Obviously with white label, it really depends on what the client wants, but again for us it's all about going above and beyond and being proactive in that sense to provide fresh content so that's kind of part of our bread and butter. 

When you were developing the business plan for this, were you thinking white label was a big part of the business or is that something that you landed on as you started talking to customers or potential customers?

Anthony Nerantzis: White label was not part of the plan at all whatsoever. That was born out of really, I would say a listening ot users. So pre launch, we were meeting with a lot of folks, and they were thrilled about and saying, hey, these plug and play options are great, compared to our rotating PowerPoint slides. Let's get this going. 

But what we noticed was there was incredible demand, really desperation for tailored content. Obviously now everything's going to be tailored, customizable, and contextual. Not only in the infotainment space, but in the retail media space. So we're ideating, Hey, what if we make these custom channels? What if we can go to a brand and say, Hey, whether you're just trying to entertain your customers, let's entertain them with news and updates about the company? And then if you're trying to sell a customer on something, why don't we drive action through content and messages, that will achieve those goals.

What we did was, we obviously went through a pretty big development phase on what we did is we put these samples in these productions in front of folks and the reaction that we got was incredible, and it really showed us that this tailored content and this white label content is really where things are moving away from the lowest common denominator and really going towards contextually relevant brand centric content.

I assume that was a pretty happy discovery because you're able to, in rough terms, 10x the monthly subscription fee from an endpoint. 

Anthony Nerantzis: We were very fortunate to be in a position where we were already tracking towards it. So yes, it was a “whoa” sort of moment, which was cool.

I don't think we could have imagined the reaction that we've received from it, and transparently, we really used InfoComm as our major kind of launch point to get our name out there, and we were expecting to show up, shake hands, get to know people, meet people. 

We brought, obviously, a little tablet. We were showing people what we were doing, and the reaction, specifically for these white labels… We were on our flight home, from Vegas, with huge smiles on our faces, I don't think we could have imagined how much these white labels, channel offerings, how much interest that would have generated.

So you were at Infocomm and I walked right by, apparently. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I guess so. I'll have to catch you at the next one. I think it's in Orlando next year, right?

Yeah. It's starting to ring a bell now that when I walk around, I take photos of stands thinking, I don't know anything about them, I don't have time to stop right now, but I'll look this up later. 

If I go through my photos, I bet you there's one in there like that and my apologies for not stopping, but, I get swarmed that week. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I'm going to let you off the hook. We did not have a booth. We were just walking around. Maybe a booth next year. Maybe you can take a picture of a booth next year. But we were just on the ground getting to know folks, trying to make the most of it. 

And you're able to do that just by having chats with people? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, we're really fortunate. Obviously, the founders are from outside the digital signage space and someone who's been a huge mentor to us is Bob Ratcliffe. I don't know if you're familiar, but he runs, really, what we found to be an incredibly consultancy and, he's really been our mentor and also guided us around the show floor, and introduced us to who we needed to know. So we're fortunate for Bob and he's obviously a great partner with us. 

Yeah, subject matter, knowledge and contacts and all that are invaluable. So how long ago did this start?

Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, we usde Infocomm to put our name out there. Transparently though, I would say since June of 2023 is when the idea was first born. 

Oh, so this is like real new? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yes. I think I mentioned earlier, but we thought we had an idea, we thought we had something, but what we did was we did a lot of listening. We met with partners even before we really put our name out there publicly.

I can't tell you how many Zoom meetings, in person conversations that we had with people in the space, CMS operators. What are you looking for from a content perspective? What are you missing? What's your current situation? The production and development process, obviously, of our software stack, took a long time, to optimize it and get it up and running to what we wanted it to be, to show up in a way that we were proud of.

So I'd say, yeah, about a year and a little before our one year anniversary, we came out to the world and timed up perfectly with Infocomm. 

So what's the state of the company at the moment? Is it like a full time company or is it a side hustle for you guys? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So we are just breaking out of our side hustle, which is amazing. The last month and a half have been an absolute whirlwind. We are in a full growth stage right now. We're incredibly proud of that. So We're going full on and we're fortunate that we were able to get so much excitement right from the jump that we're able to make this decision.

So we're definitely in the growth phase. I think the next three, six, twelve months are going to be extremely exciting. We have a lot of really cool stuff coming down the pipeline, not only with product development, but with partnerships. So we're excited about where we're at.

Actually, just last week, we were accepted into NVIDIA's Inception program for early stage startups. So that gives us a whole suite of tools that are going to propel us, even further forward with our capabilities. So we're really excited about that. 

Yeah, that's how I got wind of this and I, admittedly, didn't know a darn thing about NVIDIA's inception program. What does that do for you? Is it funding or is it just support or connections?

Anthony Nerantzis: I think a lot about the last one. So it really integrates us directly within their partner network of VCs of developer support. So I would say just from apartner in a network standpoint, that's going to be the biggest value add. The second really huge boon for us is going to be access to some advanced features within their software suite. Obviously we're always looking for ways to level up and optimize our production processes.

And with Nvidia, with their help, and being part of this network, we're going to have access to a lot of the really cool things that they're doing behind the scenes. So we're really excited about that and hopefully over the next month or two here, we're going to be able to roll out some things that are a direct result of that, being within that network, so a huge opportunity for us for sure. 

So that gives you access to a whole bunch of computing power, particularly on the graphics side, which I'm sure it is intriguing.

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. That's the name of the game right now. We need it and just to have a partner like that is pretty awesome.

If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So we're a few places. I think our channel of choice is for sure LinkedIn. go ahead and follow us on LinkedIn. We're Stream, and then our website is streammedia.news.

So we kicked .com to the side because we want to really show that we're news, we're content forward. We're not streammedia.ads. We're focused on that content with the news. With the news portion. So I encourage everyone to check us out. 

I suspect streammedia.com was also gone many years ago.

Anthony Nerantzis: Dave, you're exposing me. 

As was the stream.com, probably gone in 2003 or something. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I would imagine, yes. 

Or 1993, I don't know. Alright, Anthony, that was great. Thank you. Happy to learn more about your company and best wishes with all this, and I guess I'll see you in Orlando next year.

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, Can't wait. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you to all your listeners and we really had a lot of fun.