Digital signage is a hot topic in higher education and elsewhere. Information is king and the more ways you can put it in front of more eyes, the better. Of course, there’s all kinds of signage options from expensive to free… but you know which way I lean!
Concerto is free, open source digital signage software. It is a web based solution with a web interface for configuring your displays and content. The final product is simply a specialized web page designed to be displayed in a full screen browser. Here’s a shot of the web interface where you upload image content and an example of what you can produce with it (click for larger versions):
Concerto is a pretty slick system with lots of features. Management of content is designed around the idea of feeds, where you assign feeds to each area of the screen. You can set up groups of users and give permissions to control particular feeds. One feature that I especially like is being able to designate an emergency feed. Any content placed in this special feed overrides all others, essentially taking over the display to broadcast an emergency alert.
Concerto comes with several attractive screen layouts – ours above is based on one of the default ones with the colors changed. You can design your own background and provide an XML file to define the coordinates where the content should appear, but the documentation for doing so is thin.
Concerto has a live CD “player” that you can configure to boot and launch a signage display. Their discussion forum is very active, though hosted on Google Groups which I find to be a feature-poor discussion medium in comparison to Yahoo Groups and others.
Like any other open source alternative, Concerto does require a little elbow grease and is not without a few issues. Here’s some tips that might help if you choose to pursue it:
- An RSS feed is a great resource to include in your signage display – our campus news rolls on the right side of the screen you see above. However, the web interface currently offers no way to set up an RSS feed as content for your displays. Instead, you have to manually poke some information into the database. Look in the discussion forums for instructions on how to do this or let me know if you need some help.
- The Live CD is great as long as you have video hardware that matches its drivers. But, don’t get caught up in having to use the CD. You can simply point a web browser at Concerto and get the display, and you may not even need HDMI to drive a TV monitor. Many newer monitors have a VGA input that can handle a full 1080 lines of input to maximize your display. So, there are many options for driving your signage displays from old PCs to thin clients.
- Likewise, you don’t have to use TV monitors to show good looking digital signage. A vanilla PC monitor can do the trick and may even be preferred for a smaller venue.
- Make sure you shop for commercial grade monitors if you plan to run your signage displays all day long. You may wear out your off the shelf TVs pretty quickly.
On a side note, it is getting more and more difficult to come up with witty puns for the titles of my posts…
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Here’s a later update… we roll an RSS weather feed from rssweather.com in the ticker section, and we now use a feed of shortened versions of our news articles on the right side. Some articles are long, so the shortened version fits the signage format better and has a static prompt at the bottom to “visit our news website for more”. Below, we created a mobile version of our signage installation for use in our athletics facility so that it can be moved into the lobby during ballgames and events.
