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One of the most important aspects of running a business, one that is often overlooked, is promotion. Without effective, well targeted promotion, a business will not have any potential for growth.

With the advertising world being hugely oversaturated, businesses are looking for ways to make their promotional material eye-catching and unique. By making a small investment in some high definition screens and a PC with a video graphics card, businesses can take advantage of the latest advertising trend – digital signage.

Digital signage is an extremely flexible and versatile advertising solution. There are three main types of digital signage that companies can take advantage of:

Digital Out Of Home

Digital out of home refers to large LCD screen or video walls placed in highly visible areas outdoors. There are normally found in areas where you would otherwise see billboards, for example high traffic areas or areas with a lot of footfall. They can easily be controlled from a remote central location.

Indoor Digital Signage

Indoor digital signage, or digital posters, are becoming increasingly popular, being found in many shopping centres and retail stores. Smaller than outdoor digital signage, these single or multi monitors can be used to display information and special offers relevant to the shopper, and can even be interactive.

Mobile Digital Signage

Digital signage is now being found in public transport, like buses, taxis and trains. These displays showcase ever changing content, providing information about everything that’s going on in the city they are serving.

Digital signage and video walls are extremely versatile and vibrant advertising solution that can completely change the way you promote your business. However, they require some initial investment, including some high quality LCD screens and a powerful PC. But even if you purchase the best hardware that you can afford, your digital displays won’t be able to reach their full potential without good video wall software. Here are some features good digital display software should have:

Easy to Use Interface

Digital signage software will, more often than not, be used by people who are not necessarily computer experts. Therefore, the software solutions that you use should therefore be easily usable by anyone. Good digital signage software should let you easily arrange pictures and text in any way you like, and you should be able to preview your display before committing to it.

Simple Media Importing

Imported media like photographs, text and videos play a big part in digital signage. Media should therefore be simple to import into digital signage software. Ideally, software should have a ‘drag and drop’ interface, where media can simply be placed where you want it on the page, and the software recognises it.

Templates

When you are creating a digital signage display, you may not have time to spend researching and planning an effective layout. Good digital signage software should come with some preloaded templates that you can simply change for information about your own company. The software may even include some copyright-free photos and videos that can be used.

Spectacular shows, involving dazzling lighting, multiple big-screen displays (or video walls), and compelling audio, are now an established part of our cultural landscape. For instance, some 17 million people tuned in to the X-factor final in December 2010, nearly 30 per cent of the UK’s population.

These viewers will have experienced a flawless display of the latest hardware that underpins such large-scale public entertainment events. Of-course, not all public events are on such a vast scale. However, in all cases, the entertainment would not be so rich, colourful, synchronised, and immediate without making use of powerful video and manipulation hardware, as well as software to pull it all together, and help controllers get the best out of their cherished kit.

Take for example display wall controllers. These devices enable a single broadcast feed to be projected out on to multiple large screens. The screens can be joined together to create a video wall, or perhaps strategically placed around a large auditorium to give audience members a better view, and more immersive experience. Industry-standard wall controllers, such as those produced here at Datapath, can output to multiple screens at a consistent resolution, and even upscale image quality to give a consistently clear impression around the whole auditorium.

Another example of such technology is dual link video: our devices support “dual link” cables which enable an even higher quality of high definition video display than on, for instance, a domestic HD TV.

Such devices and technologies, whilst not featuring regularly in the gossip pages of our daily newspapers, are at the very heart of the modern entertainment industry.

For many people, their experience of graphics hardware is limited to playing the latest computer game, or downloading digital pictures and camcorder movies on to their computers.

However, when it comes to the high-end, professional market, graphics devices can go way beyond this functionality. Here are some examples of what can be achieved by finely tuned computer systems interacting with the best graphics devices on the market.

1)Video walls: These are multi-screen displays either showing a number of different video streams simultaneously on multiple monitors or a single film shared seamlessly across multiple screens. Video walls are common in air traffic control centres, cinema multiplexes, and also in corporate reception areas.

2)High end graphics cards: Such cards can support more than one output simultaneously achieving high throughput rates at consistently high resolutions (such as 1920 X 1200) for each output.

3)Video capture cards: These cards are able to capture video in real-time from devices such as HD camcorders, computers, and TVs. Video capture devices often work in tandem with a graphics card, feeding digital data to the card for outputting. Video capture devices play a crucial role in medical services, for instance recording what a probe 'sees' during an internal investigation.

Also, in the finance industry, where there’s an auditing requirement to record trading activity on each desktop, capture cards come in to their own.Here at Datapath, we energetically support the high-end graphics market with a range of robust, resilient, and incredibly powerful tools – tools which will always get the job done.

Video capture cards are now such a part of the technology mainstream that the vital roles they perform world of multimedia can only too easily be overlooked.

Indeed, in both professional and home environments, video capture devices can be indispensable, helping to bridge the gap between IT hardware and video of all kinds.

One key task in which video capture cards play a role is that of transferring analogue film from video cassettes in to digital format that can be viewed and manipulated on a computer. In this situation, the user will install a video capture card on to their computer (this is usually separate from the main graphic display in the system). They will then plug their VHS playback deck in to the capture card using an appropriate cable (e.g., SCART). They will then insert a video cassette in to the VHS player, press “play” and record the output direct on to the computer, using special recording software that comes supplied with the PC or MAC.

In a more professional context, video capture cards are used to record in real-time the screen activity of individual PCs on trading floors: a secure means of recording transactions for logging and compliance purposes. Such a professional application of video capture requires the kind of powerful, robust, industrial strength capture cards that we specialise in here at Datapath.

We could be just the right people to provide the fast, reliable video capture hardware you are looking for to meet your enterprise-level video capture requirements.

It is not an unusual to walk in to the foyer of a large scale arts centre or a multi-channel broadcaster, and be greeted by an array of screens on a wall, usually displaying different video content on each screen.

Such a multi-screen display is known as a video wall.

Video walls can be potentially enormous – the world’s largest is run by AT&T at their Global Network Operations Centre in New Jersey, and consists of a staggering 141 screens. However, more usually video walls tend to be somewhat more manageable four or nine screen installations.

Video walls offer two primary advantages over, possibly unwieldy, single-screen public displays.

First and foremost, they are flexible: multiple videos streams can be broadcast simultaneously or a single video stream can be shared across multiple screens. For instance, an air traffic control centre might want to make efficient use of multiple monitors, whilst a fashion show might use multiple monitors to display a single live stream to audience members who can’t get close to the catwalk.

Second, using a video wall setup could well be more economical than hiring or purchasing a massive single screen. These large scale public display screens can, after all, be prohibitively expensive.

Getting the best out of a video wall does, however, require the most reliable hardware and software. Here at Datapath, we can provide you with a superb industry-standard video wall controller. We can also supply you with matching video wall software to enable you to manage the video output to your satisfaction.