Join the ScreenCloud team as they gather in Thailand for a week-long deep dive into their product roadmap. Discover how they are innovating to serve the digital signage market in 2025 and beyond, and learn about the collaborative process that fuels their creativity and execution.

Collaborative Product Planning at ScreenCloud

So as you may know, at ScreenCloud, we have hubs all around the world. In January, I spent several weeks out in Thailand with the product and engineering team, and we also brought a substantial part of our Belfast engineering team over as well. For one week together, we did a deep dive into the product roadmap. We spent extensive time together, all in one room, going over our roadmap and all of our backlog of features that we've been working on, and coming up with new ideas for how we're going to serve the digital science market in 2025 and beyond. There is nothing better than getting everyone around together for several days to go really deep on this subject. It fires everyone up, the imagination goes really wild, and we came up with some amazing ideas, and now it's about execution time.

In this video, we delve into the frequent failures of screens within the IT industry, highlighting the need for improved collaboration between software and hardware vendors. Discover the ongoing challenges and how they impact trust in screens as a communication channel.

The Unreliability of Screens in IT Industry

Okay, so if we're honest with ourselves as an industry, screens are seriously unreliable. Do you know of any other IT in your world that fails with the same frequency that you see broken screens, black screens, blue screens of death out in the world? It's crazy, right? And that probably is why screens are not being used as a reliable communication channel as much as I think they should. We have to work really tightly as software vendors with hardware vendors and it is improving. It is a lot better today than it was 10 years ago. But obviously over the summer we've seen the CrowdStrike issues. So here we are at Heathrow Terminal 5 and as you can see the screens behind me in the BA lounge are still out from the CrowdStrike outage we've had earlier this year. And my error messages of the week show you that this is still a big problem that we really need to solve. If we're going to build faith and trust from people that screens should be used and won't just cause IT a massive extra headache. The reality is screens are really unreliable and we need to get better at this.

In this insightful discussion, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing product development, especially for startups with limited resources. Discover how outsourcing can provide accountability and talent access, but also the potential cultural misalignments and long-term challenges it may introduce.

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Product Development

Wow. Right. Yeah, big, that's a big topic. Okay. So I guess let's start with the advantages, especially in the early days. I'm like, I think it's actually quite advantageous to do this because growing a team when you're very small with limited budget, it takes a lot of time. Often, maybe there may not be certain technical skills in house. You might want to attract a certain level of talent, whatever it might be. So I think being able to like outsource some of your product build to another company who has those skills, who can kind of easily ramp up a team or relatively easily ramp up a team and tackle it. And who's also, you know, that team is kind of proven, like they, like, it's not the first time they've ever built a product, right. Whereas for a founder, it might, might kind of be, you never know like what their background is. So generally speaking, they can kind of apply a proven methodology, a proven team and get to work fast and deliver. They're also accountable, right? Like, so you've suddenly got this extra bit of accountability, like one throat to choke, as they say. Like if it's not working, you're like, right, come on, you know, to do that. And whilst you're also having to do a load of other things in the early stages, such as selling to customers and things like that. So I think it kind of spreads your risk a bit, increases the accountability a bit more widely. Yeah. And like, you know, there's a lot of talent out there in the world and it might be that you're also outsourcing to a team in a country that you have no personal exposure to, right? So in our case, we actually used the team in Ukraine for about two years in the early days. And the main thing we did there is we were actually rebuilding our main platform with our own engineering team and that the Ukrainian team were building kind of like integrations and add-ons to our existing platform. So that to our customers, it felt like we were still innovating on the platform whilst our core main team w

During a customer listening tour, I discovered the biggest digital signage challenges weren't software - they were physical. People unplugging HDMI cables, changing inputs, powering screens down. This changed our roadmap. We're now launching HDMI CEC integration to enable remote power cycling and input locking, eliminating the need for on-site engineer visits.

Revolutionising Digital Signage with Remote Management

So in the spring of last year, I went on a listening tour with some of our biggest customers in America and the UK. And I was walking around multiple facilities, particularly in manufacturing logistics environments, talking to the IT teams and people on the ground about what were their biggest challenges with digital signage. And repeatedly, it was a physical challenge, which is weird for a software developer to hear like me. This was people changing the source of the screen, unplugging the HDMI cable, even powering down the screen itself and showing something else. It changed our roadmap, actually, and we have decided to prioritize more assistance and monitoring around physical changes that go on in that environment. This month, we're launching HDMI CEC integration with a ScreenCloud OS platform, which enables customers to power cycle the screen remotely, but also lock that screen to certain sources and inputs. So after a period of time, it will push its way back to the digital signage and you don't need to send an engineer out to go and fix it in person.

Luke and I were shocked by the poor web experience on TV screens when we entered digital signage in 2014. ScreenCloud's founding principle is bringing modern web standards to screens, enabling the global army of web developers to build screen apps without learning new skills. We're opening up this small category to a massive software market.

Revolutionising Web Development for Digital Screens

So Luke and I have been developing products for the web for well over 20 years, despite appearances. And when we came across the digital signage category back in 2014, we were pretty shocked at the quality of the web experience natively on TV screens. And to be honest, it hasn't improved much. When you're actually trying to run a modern, fast, secure web environment, most of the screens don't work that way. And you'd actually have to build back several years, which is both insecure, but also very difficult for modern web developers to build their products. So if you do ask a web developer, how do I build a product for screen? Normally they'll just shrug their shoulders and say, we don't know. The founding principle of ScreenCloud is to try and bring a modern web experience to screen to enable this army of web developers around the world to start building their own products for screens. We're still on that journey. And I think we've now got to a point where utilizing our product, most web developers could now build an app for screen without having to learn something new. We want to keep on opening this up and bring in this huge part of the software market into our small little category, because when that happens, we can start to solve so many more problems using screens. Thank you.

Want to see how difficult digital signage is at scale? Walk through an airport past security and count the broken screens. Engineers need extensive security clearance to get airside, so failed screens just stay broken. It's the perfect manifestation of our industry's reliability challenges - fragmented hardware, different operating systems, and connectivity issues everywhere.

Challenges in Managing Digital Signage Networks at Airports

I often say to people, if you want to see how difficult it is to run a digital signage network at scale, just walk around the airport when you're past security. You'll see so many black screens, broken screens, error messages all around. In any other environment, you would never see this many broken screens. Why? Because it's really difficult to get engineers airside. They have to go through a lot of security protocols in order for them to go and visit. So you're seeing just the number of screens that fail and need some kind of physical assistance. It's a really good manifestation of the problem that we're trying to solve. Screens need to be way more reliable, but they're not. It's a hugely fragmented hardware landscape, all running different operating systems, and connectivity issues are also rife. The airport is a really good example of this, but it's actually true for every environment we work in. So next time you're in the airport, have a look around, see all those broken screens, and think there needs to be a better way, because there really does.

I explain why we built our own hardware, inspired by Alan Kay's principle that serious software requires serious hardware. To create truly enterprise-ready digital signage, we developed ScreenCloud OS in 2019-2020, partnering with a Chinese manufacturer to flash it onto the Station P1 Pro. This vertical integration approach is now our second-most popular device and growing exponentially.

The Journey to Building Enterprise-Ready Digital Signage

My co-founder, Luke, the CTO of ScreenCloud, is a big fan of Alan Kay, who's the father of personal computing. And one of his famous quotes is, people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. And now, most software developers have an allergic reaction to hardware when it comes up. But the reality is, if you're going to produce a digital signage platform that is really going to be enterprise-ready, scalable, and powerful all the way through the stack, that means you need to go down to the very lowest level, which means getting involved with hardware. Originally, we only worked with third parties, and we will always do that, because we want to give our customers full choice. But when it was clear that there weren't great options out there exactly for the kind of use case that we were prioritizing, we had to go and do it ourselves. So, back in 2019 and 2020, we did an R&D project which resulted in ScreenCloud OS, which we then ran on a piece of hardware called the Station P1 Pro, which was actually a gaming PC that was already very popular and being manufactured in China with a really wonderful manufacturer with a great relationship with them. And so, we then flashed our operating system onto that fantastic device at the factory level and then started to sell it ourselves. And it's now, rapidly, it's the second most popular device that runs on ScreenCloud. Given that that's relatively new, there's a huge exponential graph that it's going on, and I think probably, within a year or two, it'll probably be the most popular device that we have running. And with a new version of ScreenCloud OS 3.0 coming out this month, it opens up the possibility of working on an even greater variety of hardware, so we can give many more choices to our customers.

I explain why Wi-Fi connectivity for digital signage is notoriously unreliable and how ScreenCloud solves this. Screens mounted on walls create signal interference, so we run content locally on each device and sync updates when connectivity allows.

Effective Digital Signage Solutions Without Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is everywhere, right? Wrong. Although we might be able to connect most screens to a Wi-Fi network, the quality of that connection tends to be very patchy or quite poor. Screens tend to go on walls or pillars, and the computers running those screens are then behind them. So there's a lot of interference to that signal. But the screens need to work. We cannot have blank or error screens. So we run all of the content on ScreenCloud locally on each device. Fairly simple if that's just images and videos, but more complicated when it's a web-powered product. That runs locally on the computer, and then we just take updates over the web when that Wi-Fi is working again, if it ever does.