-
Minority Reports
Hi all
Have you seen the movie Minority Reports? With the screens and electronic billboards all over the shop (literally).
Over the last couple of years there have been numerous white papers and consultancy reports about how narrowcasting, live media and electronic displays are going to eventually replace paper/vinyl/ et al as the de facto method of displaying point of sale signage.
I think this is an interesting subject, because behind the scenes of the industry, a lot of people are talking it up, but no-one seems to have done anything about it, or indeed been able find enough customers expressing an interest.
Up to now the take up of this technology has been far slower than has been projected by these supposed industry luminaries. I am genuinely curious to hear from the sign industry as to why they think the technology has been so slow to take off?
Why do you think it is that a technology being pitched as the ‘next big thing’ is being largely ignored by arguably the largest potential installer and provider, the signmaker.
Our curiosity, or perhaps even concern, is that as a provider of systems for large and wide format outdoor advertising, are we going to see our market eroded by these new systems in the foreseeable future.
Equally, it could be a concern for all of us in the industry, because there is the alarming possibility that in the future traditional static shop signage could be replaced by interactive or broadcast systems installed and managed by multimedia design agencies rather than signmakers?
-
7 Replies
-
Marc, you are right to raise the concern as it has been something that I was thinking about, what is the real future here.
I ‘did’ write an computer application 5 years that controlled 200-300 advertising screen TV’s while that was in it’s infancy, it did fairly well and we sold it to a PLC bank, but it now has come to it’s end of line for them as new technology is already out.
The thing that was being developed is now been mentioned more is the video paper, imagine TV as a sheet of vinyl, I have seen this demonstrated on TV and it is something not to be ignored. At the time we was thinking about supermarkets and to be able to change prices along the isles in a fraction of a second and to market out items like ‘videos from Heinz’. So when I saw Minority Reports recently, it put it all into a perspective, this could happen to us very soon.
I think the paper TV is something that has been keept under wraps for a long while, I mean just think of the damage it will cause Sony/Toshiba in the TV market, let along digital print in all aspects, litho to sign making.
-
Video paper. That’s a new one on me, I’m off to search Google 😀
Perhaps similar to this is a new technology from a company called Magink.
By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be manipulated with electric charges to change the colour, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images.
This technology is aimed at billboards currently, and only displays static images that can be cycled, because the speed of colour change is not yet able to achieve a frame speed that will support smooth moving imagery.
The cost is also very low compared to LCD or LED. However LCD costs are decreasing rapidly. It’s not pie in the sky either, we have seen Magink at some of the European signs shows and they had a big 6m x 3m billboard on test in London last year in conjunction with Clear Channel and Ford. Magink are an Israeli company, backed (or perhaps now even owned) by Mitsubishi.
It is certainly interesting, and well worth keeping tabs on.
Back on topic though, I’m still more interested in why the take-up of existing technology has been so much slower than has been variously projected.
-
I was at a 2 day conference about this recently , its a huge subject with many areas for discussion , in terms of instore TV , Tesco plan to have “Tesco TV” but are charging the brands for advertising so using them as a form of revenue, initial trials in stores using only plasma or LCDs had limited success as very often we have become so used to having a box in the corner on and not watching or listening to it, ASDA had some in certain isles in test stores and only a relatively small percentage of shoppers noticed they were there !! OLED and POLEDs are the next generation and they will certainly add something new.
The general consensus ,At the moment, is that it works well alongside traditional POP and perhaps only about 5% of traditional POP will be replaced by this technology in the next 5 years.
I have a copy of the presentations on CD if anyone is really interested , i think the large Screenprinters may have more to be concerned with than the average Signmaker. -
it is all about the position of a display, for instance at a post office que or a checkout cue works well as you are trapped almogst people looking for something to look at… the isle things would have been good, another one that i have seen is trolleys which react to the isle you are in. You might that on Google.
Marc, Magink is exactly what I was trying to say… in fact i did see that on SkyNews but about 5 years ago my collegues did speak to an American university (?) about funding the development when we was into all this.
At SignUK a few years back I saw £1K per panel 17″ LCD monitor which could be attached to wire displays with embedded windows/unix, I knew then that this market would be huge. The system I developed allowed you to control advertising at many tiers, local, national, data, linking with news and video streams etc., but was undersold and technology was coming out and just couldn’t keep up with it.. these days I stick with digital printing etc.
-
Very interesting, but not much use to my customers. They won’t spend that sort of money. 🙁
With regard to technology, has anybody had a look at the Apple iPod Nano? It’s tiny, 6.9mm thick with 4gig of flash memory and a colour screen. That technology, when applied to computers, is going to revolutionise the industry. The only problem is that 4gig is not perceived as being enough storage but, to be honest, dealing with vector files, it would be enough for me. After eighteen years in business my total archive is less than one gig! As flash memory gets bigger and comes down in price the potential is there for some mind-blowing stuff.
Apple already have the technology to produce a quantum leap forward in laptop design, one that would wipe the floor with all the competition. Ridiculously thin, longer battery life with no requirement to keep discs spinning, faster access with flash etc etc.
It’s only a matter of time!
-
The ipod nano (and even PDA’s) is a perfect example… use the same operating technology and then output it to different screens. 4Gb is about as big as it gets at that size, its always increasing but memory on chip is a big player, however a Flash video file is very small footprint, can easily get many videos/demos of food products onto one of them or even a 64Mb chip.
Microsoft saw where this was going and developed a much improved version of Windows Embedded, linux did and apple has.
Estate agents is the only people I can see using interactive window displays systems but no good for a south facing window.
-
TV’s printed on an Inkjet See what i mean
Log in to reply.
