I delve into the evolving landscape of digital signage and its market potential. With traditional notice boards being replaced by screens, we discuss the vast opportunities and the need for education in this growing sector.

Exploring the Future of Digital Signage

One of the biggest question marks around digital signage from an investment point of view has been the addressable market. So if you actually size digital signage today, I think it comes up at a $30 billion market and only $1 billion of software spend, which is relatively small considering what it should be. Personally, I think the market is much, much larger than that. And I know that there's certain large investment firms also share that thesis. If you think about it, in the next five to 10 years, will there really be notice boards with bits of paper hanging on them anymore? I don't think so. That doesn't feel right. What's that going to be replaced with? Screens or a version of screens. The hardware landscape is evolving, but the need is not. The need is there. So we have a big greenfield opportunity. Generally speaking with customers, we're not replacing and churning out one of our closer competitors. Maybe we're taking something that's really outdated, on premise or even homegrown. And mostly this is a greenfield opportunity. So I think that the market size is infinite, which sounds a bit scary and strange. But we need to educate everyone on why we should be dropping the paper, putting a screen up and using that instead. Thank you.

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.