Digital Signage Unwrapped

Summary:

• Uncover the ‘aha!’ moments that move teams towards digital signage.
• See how others turned communication frustrations into big opportunities.
• Take a glimpse into the future, see the trends that will shape what comes next.

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TRANSCRIPT

Alright. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today, to our Digital Signage unwrapped presentation. We have a very wide range of audience, members today, full of potential Digital Signage users. We have some longtime users of Carousel. A couple walk ups who are just interested to see what this whole thing is all about.

My name is Cullen Gross. I'm the sales engineer here at Carousel. I'll be joined throughout the presentation by a few other members of the Carousel team as well.

And as far as who we are, just to kind of preface, right, kinda disclaimer on this presentation, we're Carousel. We've been in the digital signage space for over twenty seven years. We currently offer our CMS Carousel Cloud for content management for digital signage. I will preface that this is not, like, a pitch deck by any means.

We're really focusing on providing some vendor agnostic information today. A lot of the stories come from, you know, obviously, like, Carousel's customer pool. But this is really usable at any stage of a signage journey, including starting, improving, or coming back to. Right?

The big goal of this is to walk you through that journey from having a communication gap to having a communication win this year and in next year.

I'll talk about our agenda for what this presentation is going to entail. It's kind of a longer one. It does cover quite a few different aspects of signage. So our goal here today is all about unwrapping that whole experience from curiosity to your communication goals and identifying them and then having those wins for the next year.

But we're also gonna look back into twenty twenty five and kinda show you what we saw, right, from the CMS provider perspective. Our first section will focus on compelling events, that point where a communication or operation gap is recognized, to get people to start thinking digital communication in the first place. It's gonna be a perfect section for for for new or potential users of digital signage. Our second section is a bit longer, but involves what digital signage is, how it's used, and what we see as important for organizations today versus the past that you should be aware of.

And then also some considerations when you're a customer of any CMS provider, sort of what that ongoing partnership is like. And then we'll kinda close-up with a section to kinda look into the future, kind of see what we're seeing, what other people are looking for and asking for, and sort of set you up for for what you might think might be different in twenty twenty six. We'll also be providing a little tool called the digital signage starter kit. You won't have to wait too long to get that.

We'll link that in the chat fairly soon in our first section. That's essentially like a guide or a checklist to to plan, improve, and strengthen your digital communications through digital signage.

That's kind of a nice vendor agnostic checklist you can go through. It's useful if you're a new user, upcoming user, previous user. Helps you just kinda know what questions to ask. So when you start making those steps forward, you kind of have some information to provide when you take that journey.

First, we need to talk about how we even get here. Right? How does digital science even become relevant to an organization? I'm joined here by Claire who has a lot of different roles and a few different titles, but is probably the person who is the first point of contact the most when people start their their journey. So, Claire, does a person just wake up one day, throw off the sheets, and just say, I need digital signage? Or can it be more nuanced than that in reality?

Yeah. There's a little bit more to that. Most most people start, their journey looking to improve their communication across the their organization. When people come to Carousel, I I hear a variety of challenges and questions.

If you look back at the at the last year, what are some of those, like, challenges and questions you see? Would you say that you have, like, a top three trends that you've that you've really heard the most?

Yeah.

The first one is, broad, but just better and clear communication. So people are often looking for a more centralized way to distribute, communications throughout their organization and just having it, easier for everyone. The second is just growing needs. Maybe there's a new building going up or new departments that want to join, their digital signage system, and they want it to be easier to manage across all those buildings and departments. And the third, would say, is inheriting, an existing solution. So maybe someone left and you inherited an existing digital signage solution, or a lot of people have homegrown digital signage solutions, and they're trying to move away from those and and turn to something that could be easier using some hardware they already have.

Now the last one is interesting. Right? Inheriting a system. It kinda shows us that a lot of these digital signage or digital communication initiatives can sometimes last longer than the people who are responsible for it. Right? Do you have an example of, like, a customer touchpoint or journey that started with that sort of situation?

Yeah. It's quite quite often that I speak with people who inherit an outdated or end of life digital signage solution. So in this case, it was Google Sign Builder, a tool many people have relied on for years because it was simple and it got the job done.

But as we talked through setting up their system and what they were looking to do, we discovered that they could continue using the hardware that they have across their buildings and made that transition easier and more cost effective than they were expecting.

Now the big trend that I see from that story and everything you stock foot stock talked about so far, is really that identifying the communications gaps is the first step to adding or improving a digital signage employment, and that might not even start with digital signage. Would you say that that's fairly accurate?

Yep. Yep. You're totally right.

And that's why, we created the digital signage starter kit, which Colin mentioned earlier, and we will give you access to that today. It outlines key considerations that will help you build, refine, and expand, an effective digital signage deployment. So a question that I have and I'll leave you all with, as we continue is what communication gaps are you currently facing, today and that you're looking to fix, maybe in the new year? So feel free to put that in the chat, and, we can revisit that during the q and a section.

Perfect. Thank you, Claire. And, Mitch, if you don't mind now, if you're just putting that link in there as well now, and we'll put it at the end as well. I like to not bury the lead, and I think of that tool as why a lot of people came, and I should have it available as soon as possible.

So let's now talk about just like what is a digital signage CMS. Right? You've identified your gaps. You've filled out the starter kit.

You kinda know or at least where you are and maybe where you wanna go. Right? How does digital signage help that? Right?

I think a lot of people kind of think that's kind of a a tool of the past. Right? Or, you know, people aren't in the physical areas as much as they used to be. Some of those things are true, but I kinda walk you through why this is still relevant.

Right?

As Claire spoke about, there's a lot of compelling events, and a lot of those don't always even scream digital signage at first. Right?

Some end up finding that it is a solution, though, to solve their communication issues.

The basic core of a digital signage CMS or any content management system, even one that just provides digital signage as an aspect of it, is to provide you with the tools, automation, and services for you to quickly and easily get the right message to the right audience where they are at the perfect time. Right? As far as the outcomes, these are really like outcomes. Right?

So we had an issue. We found out how to address it, and we put the screen up in that spot for that audience. Right? This slide shows examples of where we help people achieve those goals within the last year.

A big point of this slide is just really to reiterate communication gaps, be it employee communication, improving employee messaging, helping people navigate the building, etcetera. It's a wide range in scope, but they all share the idea that there's a message that isn't getting reached to the right audience, and you need a tool to help get it there. Right? So I think a lot of times people will think, you know, I have this problem, not that I need digital signage.

And that's where, like, it kind of, like, comes back the other way. It's kind of sometimes in reverse.

When we talk about the current landscape of it, right, because things have changed. Right? We've had we've had slide we've had screens on the on the wall, you know, forever. Even since, like, I was a kid, there's been screens on walls showing things.

Now although that solution has been consistent throughout the years, the approach and requirements have drastically changed in the last few. Right? Our customers that we talk to, right, are looking for ease of use above else. Right?

One thing that can totally kill a digital signage system is stale content or it no longer providing the accurate information to the audiences. Right? The the same use case of why it started needs to be easy to maintain over time for it to continue to be successful. A lot of people are asking for CMSs these days not to just be easy to operate, but to also work with their existing systems.

Right? So instead of logging into a vendor CMS, making content in that system, publishing it in that system, people want it to work with their existing tools. This includes Canva, so a content creator doesn't even need to learn a new tool at all. They can just connect their CMS to Canva, make their presentation there, and to play display it on the screen.

Google Sheets or the Microsoft Suite for easy transition from something end of life like Google Sign Builder, or just hand it off to a user who, you know, is comfortable making a PowerPoint slide but not might be comfortable learning a brand new tool.

And then some metrics, like, from things like Power BI.

It's more important than ever that a CMS doesn't lock you down into its idea of how you should create content, instead enables you to use tools you already have so you don't have to, like, ruin those workflows.

Second, digital communication. Right? You kinda see that I'm kind of, like, replacing digital signage with the commune digital communication. That's kind of a theme that we also see here as well. Has become more of a team lift than ever before.

Rarely do I have a person come up to me and say that they're gonna be the sole owner of the entire system. They're gonna manage every screen, every conference room. They're gonna do it all themselves.

More often, there's multiple people, often from multiple teams that wanna collaborate. So when you're kinda considering improving or starting a signer system, knowing who is gonna manage it and what level of control you wanna provide can really help make it a team lift and not something that's required for one person to to operate.

And then, you know, another big shift that we've also seen is a real hunger to move away from vendor locked hardware. Right? Some organizations purchase screens and hardware before they pick a CMS, which totally seems backwards. But if you kind of imagine you're building a new area, you think about the rooms, you get your screens installed, what content you want. And sometimes the last question really is, how do we manage this content? Right? Having a system that at least supports the hardware your IT team is familiar with and able to manage goes a long way in ensuring that your investment lasts a long time.

When I say investment, I do mean it. Here are some stats I like to show, kind of like what we've seen throughout the landscape here.

Seventy three percent of educational organizations find that digital signage is vital to their communication strategy, which is kinda wild because previously, I would say five years and back, digital signage was like a luxury. It was kinda like a cool thing to have. You walked in. You saw a screen. You know, that was more of a front facing way to kinda jazz up your space. But now more than ever, education educational institutions find it vital, especially for, like, emergency communications or reaching out to students who might not open email at all, right, just kinda given how they operate with technology.

Of the companies that that of all companies, those that use or don't use digital signage, fifty percent of them believe that their communication strategy has improved through digital signage. Right? And that that information is more accurate with fifty two percent. This just kinda shows that although the idea of digital signage, just digital communication has lasted a long time, like, more than ever, it seems to be more and more important, and we do have some sources for these stats as well, just to kinda show that this this is an investment. It's not just a nice to have. In a lot of organizations, it is a must to have.

Now let's say you go through that journey. You just you find your gaps. You get your system up. You you roll it up.

Right? I'm joined here on this slide by Scott. He's our director of customer experience because I wanna reiterate that the support you get is a huge consideration and likely even more important than the bells and whistles I've mentioned up to this point. Scott, say someone takes all this in.

They use it to assign a starter kit to get started. They have their screens up. Is that it? There's never any other problems or any changes in the future?

Yeah. You know, Colin, actually, that statement is true.

In some cases, where an organization has very simple goals and content that doesn't need updating very often. Maybe sprinkle in a few dynamic elements like weather and time, and then just kinda set it up and let it roll. But for other and probably the more common situations, things can be a little bit more involved and dynamic and choosing the right plan, and having a customer experience team to partner with you from the start all the way through your renewal, is very important. So the amount of support, guidance, and service you may need varies on a lot of different factors. So factors such as the complexity of your environment, the personnel involved in their skill sets, your timelines, and just kinda your overall communication strategy.

Thinking about that level of service and support that you desire or that you need prior to signing on with the signage vendor or even throughout your subscription if your needs change mid subscription, which they do, can be very important in the success of senior communication strategy play out long term.

So some organizations have a dedicated team, technical staff, graphic designers. They're equipped to handle signage and really wanna push the envelope with what the system can do. And here at Carousel, we do have plans and support options to to help kinda organize that and help out in that realm. But not all organizations have that.

But it's definitely still feasible to be successful with your communication strategy. So, I know you mentioned, Colin, that there's, you know, most organizations don't have just one person doing it all, but I'm gonna give you an example that kind of is to the contrary of that. I've been working with a global organization that has a single person in charge of getting the signage system up across the globe. So a daunting task.

This individual who is a total rock star, by the way, needed some extra guidance with getting hardware configured, some design work to create a a framework for them to put their content in. And they're on a plan that matches that need, and their deployment is going very well. And we're actually guiding this person how to scale that even a little bit larger and distribute some of that content creation work, and some of the other things out to some of the local folks, where that signage is. So and when things change, which they do, new use cases pop up.

Sometimes you get your signage up, then another department or, someone else sees it and they say, hey. We want a little bit of personnel changes, and, hey. We're working with technology. And as much as we wish that it wouldn't, sometimes it doesn't work as expected.

So it's essential to, have good resources providing guidance, technical support, training, and just other resources to you and your team.

Perfect. And and those resources really are vital. Right? And that's kind of, like, one the reason why we have this section sometimes we can get kinda caught up in the bells and whistles and the features and the outcomes.

Right? And we have to remember that, like, to make sure that your system's gonna have longevity, that support is pretty huge. And I think in a world where we have a lot of subscription services and a lot of CMS providers are subscription services, you have to kind of ask yourself what that subscription gives you. And I think finding the right partner and the right level of support will make sure that you're not having to go on a do it alone like your one customer example might have.

And some some users might be able to do more things with less services, and some users might need white glove service. So I think it's important, and that's kind of a question in our digital signage starter kit. It's just something to consider that sometimes people don't consider until they've already, you know, crossed the line. Right?

Thank you, Scott.

I wanna bring up just some stats from just from just Carousel ourselves. Right? And we're just kinda one member of a a larger group of CMS providers. Right? I just wanna kinda show you how often this is used. Right?

When it comes to our users, we do get some stats. They're pretty limited. We can really only see if people are doing stuff, but we don't know what they're doing, and we don't know what the nature of the content is or what they put up there. It's kind of part of our privacy strategy here.

But we we can see when someone at least makes something. So almost two million pieces of content, right, which we can't delineate if they're, like, images, videos, Power BI, but over almost two it's rounding up. Almost two million messages getting to their audiences in just the last year. Right?

And if you extrapolate this to the whole industry, it's probably many, many times that if you include all forms of digital messaging through screens.

The user logins is pretty funny because we do a lot of work to try to make it so users don't have to actually log in to Carousel to make changes on the screen. So the stat's kinda funny because, like, going up or going down really doesn't indicate too much, but it's sure that we do have a lot people that log in and use the system quite often. And then we also have a lot of services that we tied number two. Right?

Really doing as much as we can to provide education and training through our Carousel Academy. Right? Making sure that we create custom branded channels and themes for users of that tier who need more of a brand unified experience, and over three hundred hours of our training videos being watched asynchronously by our customers. So this altogether just really shows that even in our slice of the pie, it's important, it's used, and it gets leveraged quite well.

Now before we wrap up, I'm also joined by Eric, who previously was the president for Carousel for a long time, and now will operate as the CFO for our parent company, Tyro Media Systems. Eric, I bring that up because you personally, for the last year, have been all digital signage. But looking forward, you're gonna be more focused on digital messaging at large.

Where do you see digital communication beyond just screens going in twenty twenty six, or are there other trends that you've also noticed?

Yeah. I love that question.

So I would say if we really step back and we think overarching stories, what we're seeing is a lot of discussion around culture. So a lot of organizations, especially our our corporate friends, are really wrestling with what culture looks like, return to work, distributed teams, all of these types of things. So that's really a big theme sort of a backdrop that is informing how we see the world and and what we're hearing. The other big theme is certainly what's with all this AI stuff.

And so I wanted to kinda start with framing those two. I think those are pretty big conversations. If you read the news headlines any day, it's either, hey. Return to work stuff or how what's what's happening with hybrid and remote work and all these types of things, what our corporate cultures look like.

In the higher ed space, we're hearing a lot around really difficult to connect with their employees or their students, and we already have lots and lots of communication methods. So how how do we lean into and really deliver the communications to people where they need it? Colin, you showed a stat earlier about the accuracy of information improving to fifty two percent.

Really important. And so where we're where we're seeing things go and the emphasis we're putting on our investment in this space and the tools and what we're encouraging people to think about is looking at our communication strategy much more like we think about our marketing strategies. And so when we say that, it is thinking about, okay. When we deliver a marketing message, our goal is highly targeted, curated, delivered right to the people that may resonate with that marketing message.

That's really true as well for any sort of employee communication or student communication. And so that's where this first pillar for us is your message more places. And so we've talked about digital signage in lots of places, and that includes things like personal devices. And so how we know that people are seeing a lot of things on their phones or on their desktops.

We're all sitting most likely at our computers right now. How do we deliver that same content in multiple places for people to take action on or raise their awareness? And so we talked about the effectiveness of digital signage as being one of those things that really helps disseminate information accurately, but also people, like, absorbing it and recognizing that they even saw that piece of information. So that's really a really a big thing that I think more and more organizations are gonna lean into is thinking much more strategically about where we're delivering the content and and how we can really curate and target that information.

And along with that, for us as an organization, one of the things that we believe is it's really important to give you the tools to have better content insights. And so as we move to new devices like a desktop or a tablet or a mobile device and we're delivering content to people, let's say, the annual renewal process, we can actually tell you how many people are subscribed to that content, Did they engage with that content? Was that effective? And I think that will really help us come alongside our customers and give them guidance in terms of, hey.

This campaign worked really well. This one didn't. Or we're seeing this over here or this other organization, this other school has found through their residence life stuff, communications campaigns. They've seen a great uplift in in attendance to events, those types of things.

And so I think smarter content insights is really another theme that we're seeing and and people are hungering for to make the investment they've they've made even more effective and fruitful. And so as Colin was sharing, there's there's more and more device support and all of these types of things. We're gonna see, I think, more of how do I put that same message here and over there. And then as Scott was sharing, sometimes it's very small groups that are maintaining very large networks.

How do we give the tools in a way that allows that to scale even more?

With AI, I think the interesting thing, a lot of times we move to the this question of, can we have AI create the content? I'm actually gonna present a different challenge I think that we all might wanna consider, which is with AI, the amount the sheer volume of content that is being created we're seeing is increasing. We would say that's increasing the noise level quite a bit. So here we are with digital signage networks. What we're arguing is that the effectiveness of any digital signage network is that it is actually a highly targeted curated list of content and communications that we want people to know about, and that's super important because I believe the trend is going to be a lot more noise and a lot more content that we cannot trust because we're already seeing that. Is that a deep fake thing? Was that an AI video?

What's very interesting about digital signage networks is I know that this is Harvard's system or or whoever, you know, like, fill in the blank if you're a higher ed or if you're a corporate. If you're curating your own content and you are delivering trusted content to your people, people are gonna know that that's coming from you. And I think that's a super important thing to continue thinking about how do we deliver not only more accurate information, but information we can trust actually came from this source. That's an interesting shift I think that we're gonna see in signage moving forward is that part of the value is that I can trust it.

And so we wanna lean into how do we give you guys more and more tools to ensure the right people are creating the content, that it is viable and trusted content, it's getting delivered to the right people, and that we can adjust as we need to in terms of how much people are engaging that content or where it's getting delivered and those types of things. And so I would say that at a really high level, for us, that means things like we call them express player feeds, and so we allow you to to take and deliver signage content to Teams rooms or Zoom rooms or these other you know, your website, those types of really interesting endpoints.

We have this thing called Carousel Daily that allows people to scan a QR code and tune into a feed if I'm a freshman on campus or I happen to work at store forty seven as part of one of our larger corporate customers. And so so that's, I think, kinda where we're we're seeing the trends and the possibilities going forward is is actually not only are more organizations coming to rely on their signage networks, but I'm anticipating they're gonna come even more critical for disseminating trusted information.

Those are good insights. Thank you, Eric, for kinda sharing that, and good luck with your kinda future, role there as well. Yeah. Thank you.

So now a lot of information was put into this presentation. Right? So it was also was kind of the goal of this was also to create a digital signage starter kit, we've linked before, we'll link now as well. And it's really for anyone, someone who's new or old to digital communication or just a way to get started or improve your system.

It's not Carousel specific, like I mentioned before. It functions more like a checklist for considerations to turn your goals into wins in the next year. So I would challenge whoever you are to just give that a download, take a look. At the very least, it'll kinda give you some insights on some things that maybe you didn't think about, and then you could, you know, go to the market, either come to us or go to someone else and have kind of an idea of where you wanna be.

I do wanna thank everyone for coming in and sticking with us here till the end. I do look forward to seeing, you know, us provide more webinars into the next year as well. Just know if you did want to have a kind of a more live version of the signage starter kit to walk through your goals and plans. You can obviously, you know, reach out to us if you wanna start the journey that way.

But I wanna thank you all for coming over. We'll be taking questions in the chat here shortly, and wish you all happy holidays. Have a great day.

Before everyone jumps out or asks some questions, I'm just gonna launch a quick poll to let us know how you would like to us to follow-up with you. So if you can please answer that, that would be great.

Perfect. I don't know if that shows up on my screen, but that's okay if it does.

I will stop sharing.

Perfect.

Alright. So I got some questions here, so if we have some.

I'm seeing one from Ross that says, what AI is not going to be truth in advertising?

Right. Almost almost exactly. Right? Like, because of the data models and the and the and where it comes from and where that data is actually, you know, vetted from. I think and I and there's, like, a whole conversation of AI. I don't think it necessarily needs to always be about digital signage, but I think when I look at AI, I look at it as as a tool sometimes for, like, stats where we're, like, gathering information, not necessarily what should be used to produce, like, that end truth or that end content. This is sort of a personal opinion, but I think that that Ross is a hundred percent right.

And we have the link in there.

Some oh, I think I don't know if oh, we we got it to everyone. Okay. We were sending the link to the to just the participants, the panelists. That's why you guys didn't see it at first. So that should be in there now as well.

Alright. I'll give it a few more minutes if there are any questions.

Use a Steam disk to trigger macro, different aspects in Carousel.

That's a good question, Antonio. So Carousel does have an open API, so we are able to take in API commands. So it's not we do have, like, a lot of control room systems. Like, we'll change content automatically, right, or buttons will. And it wouldn't be too hard, I don't think, to get a Steam Deck to send a HTTP push to Carousel to to change that content on demand.

Yeah. Exactly right. I I saw that too over over the the week. The I never saw the commercial, but I heard about it.

Kevin asked if our technology supports touch screens. Yeah. So we must remember that Carousel is software only, so we are able to support interactive presentations, but you would need a touchscreen and a hardware device that supports it. Carousel allows you to publish that, so the short answer is yes.

But you also wanna make sure that the hardware you choose and the screen you choose are also compatible between each other. Carousel does have the option to refresh that over a certain amount of time. So if someone walks up, touches it, and walks away, Carousel can refresh it if no one's touched it for, like, twenty seconds or thirty seconds or so. Good for wayfinding, good for historical walls, things like that.

Well, so so Antonio's question is kinda what other third parties do we collab with?

We have a few, like, unofficial partnerships from people that we think are cool in the space. ScreenWeave is one of those. Right? They can just basically curate content in a bunch of different areas and give you a URL to display, then we can display that URL.

So that's pretty useful.

Within our, like, direct integrations, you know, Power BI data is really huge as far as, like, communication structures like that go. But, essentially, if it's a URL link, we can display it. So I think if there was one person I was gonna call out specifically, not a paid partnership or anything, I would say Screenweave is a cool place to look at.

Say screen feed.

Oh, and screen oh, sorry.

Too many products. Screen feed, I apologize. Yeah. Screen screen feed is what you need to look at. Yeah.

Screen weave is cool too, but yes.

Yeah. Sorry. Screen yeah. Feed. You wanna feed your screen. Screen feed. There we go.

Then Alan asks, do you offer this type of webinar session monthly or quarterly?

We've been doing a lot of webinars as far as, like, educational ones, training ones. That's really gonna be a question to Claire as far as ones of this scope. This is definitely a larger scope than we typically put out more than once a year. But I don't know, Claire, if you have some insights for how you wanna move forward.

Yeah. In twenty twenty six, we will have quarterly webinars.

And, Ellen, if you wanna put in the chat, if if you appreciate, the monthly or quarterly or if there's something in particular that you'd like to see, we also have our webinars, posted on the top of our website, as well.

Thank you.

And then just I know the, the link to the starter kit was getting buried. So I will, follow-up with everyone. Our our marketing team will follow-up with everyone with that link as well. So if you weren't able to grab it, it will be in an email as well.

Another question from Carousel interface with cable cast systems in regards for feeding and receiving content. So just some context, Carousel is a part of TiteRoot Media Systems. TiteRoot Media Systems also has another product called CableCast, which is used for cable station automation, well and beyond what the this webinar is for. But to your question, sort of, the two products keep they're different business groups, so they but the products keep kind of leveraging further and further away.

The channels in CableCast and Carousel are still compatible, which is kinda crazy. But both systems can actually output RSS, and they can input RSS. So depending on the content that you're trying to get out of those two systems, just, you know, talk to your support team, and we can usually find a way to to make those talk in a agnostic way.

I'll give it let's see. Another one from Antonio. Not sure if it's doable. Haven't used Carousel.

A lot of it is yet. Is there also a live integration within with NDI or API for live? So so this is kind of a streaming question. So Carousel does actually have three different ways to display, like, live video.

We have streaming live video that can either come from, like, a YouTube live video feed, or we can also ingest and display HLS feeds as well. And, of course, the API can even trigger that to turn on. I guess one example is we'll have some, like, high schools that'll do, like, morning announcements. Right?

They'll literally press a button. It'll turn on a streamer. All of the carousel signs will change to that that live feed, and then it'll do, like, the morning show, right, to the entire school. So that's kind of a live streaming option.

The other option is some devices also have HDMI pass throughs so that if you wanted to, like, have a portion of the screen be a live source, like a physical source, like a cable box or something, you could have that on the screen while augmenting it along the sides or top or bottom with more information as well.

That's a good question. The kind of follow-up to Antonio's first question on streaming is, does it allow for multiple or split livestream? Carousel at at the time were really reliant on the hardware. In most cases, you can only do one phys like, one stream at a time, but nothing would stop you from having multiple streams go into one encoder and then giving us that as one stream.

Tang asks, currently a Carousel customer. Good good to see you. Is there a way to have specific approvers for specific users within the same zone? For example, multiple users in the same zone but wanna specify a user's manager as their approver.

So the question here, Carousel does have an approval workflow per zone. Right? So you have submitters and approvers, which we can do pretty easily. What this question is asking is within those groups, can I just say, like, this specific submitter can be approved by this specific approver, such as, like, a manager?

I will bring that back as feedback. At the moment, it's just kinda zone specific, but I think that as we like we've mentioned before, where there's more collaboration, I think that's something that we can bring back and talk about as far as how we manage that. If you don't mind, if you could actually send an email to the support team and just kinda bring up that use case, they can submit a feature request for you as well, and they might have some additional questions for you as how you would imagine that working out well.

Alan asked, will you be offering a recording of these great q and a's? It seems like we will. Not my call, but Yeah. Mitch says yes.

Antonio asked, is there a listing of different types of media that can be used with the Carousel and those that don't? Yeah. We do have on our support page, which I can probably get you a link here in a second, we do have, like, a a media page.

Essentially, pretty much any image and video type, RSS, HLS. For uploaded videos and images, we'll actually convert it. So, like, if you upload a file format that we can read but your player can't, we'll actually convert that all to, this is technical, h I two six four in a MOV wrapper.

Thank you, Scott. Scott just put that in the chat there for you to review as well.

Antonio also thanks us for the hard work. Thank you for thank you everyone who's still with us and asking all these great questions.

It's always it's always cool to, like, put a lot of time into producing these and then actually having people show up, ask questions, and engage. So thank you too as well for being part of it.

I feel like we should play stump calling because some of these questions, like Yeah.

Keep going.

You're you're rocking them so far. I'm not even looking them up. So somebody's gotta ask a doozy.

Yeah. Give me some SOC two type two questions, data governance.

Alan says, they currently use BrightSign as their primary hardware with the cloud version deployed. Will they stay around for a while? So BrightSign is context here. BrightSign is one of many possible hardware providers for digital signage.

Right? So it is an option, which is nice because you have options. Should your needs change or hardware goes away, you never have to, like, switch your CMS providers, like with Carousel. We've been their partners for, I don't know, Eric, ten years or so, and they they stick around.

Twelve. Twelve. I also tell Alan that now they're doing five year warranties on their devices as well. So it would lead me to believe that your devices will be around for a while, and I also believe that BrightSign will be around for a very, very long time in the future.

We're also adding some really cool to make it really easy, even there's even better workflows around configuring BrightSign player all of our players. As as we talk about delivering our content to more devices, we're also really investing a lot in making the deployment of that super, super simple, including BrightSign. And so I would imagine that, yeah, they should be around for a while. I think they're well run. They have great hardware.

Even if you buy it now, you're probably gonna be using it, like Colin said, in five years, seven years. Wouldn't be surprising.

Antonio asked about live streaming and third party softwares like OBS and Streamlabs. Yep. So I do that too. I do that in my house, actually. I'll set up OBS. I'll have a stream to my carousel players as long as it's a supported one like an Apple TV or BrightSign.

And then, Alan, yeah, they they are not cheap. Right? So you want those to last. I will say as long as BrightSign still supports them through software, we also support them. But, like, I have I have a BrightSign player in my house that is no longer compatible with Carousel that I still use, and it's ten years old. So I think you you'll get get your money's worth out of them for sure.

Let's see. Most screens are now all in one. Yeah. So there's some that are just, like, just by default, like, open ecosystems. Right? So there's some, like Bluefin is a is a manufacturer of screens that are all in one. Obviously, you have your commercial displays by, like, Samsung and Sony and LG that our apps are just, like, within their app stores as well.

So, yeah, as Ross is kinda pointing out, there's, you know, even more options that are, you know, all in one versus just a screen and a stand alone device.

And you don't even need to jailbreak the OS because we support them.

So Yeah.

That's true.

Also, in when I might add to that one, what we found with the all in ones is those manufacturers are getting much better at at maintaining a predictable operating system, not changing firmwares every three months. So the all in one world really is getting historically, we've kinda stayed away from that because they didn't have the robust support of a BrightSign or an Apple or some of these other ecosystems.

The all in one partners have really come a long way in terms of not only the power within the panels and those types of things, but also just in Scott's world, maybe you could even speak to this, but just way more reliable and predictable experience in the all in one space. And so that's that's why we've really as part of our being able to put content anywhere leaned into those relationships because we found that it's been a a much more positive experience. So lots of opportunities all over the place to put signage on screens.

Howard asked if there's any plans to develop asset tagging. So it can be pulled off a specific set of devices, building channel playlist. So the way that Carousel sort of functions, right, with, like, the zones and having those playlists is that typically if you wanted to have one piece of content into multiple different areas that maybe are similar in some some way, maybe they're all on the same floor or they're in the same building. But the regular content they run is different because it's per department.

You would typically have to make a piece of content and then manually share it out as, like, a linked bulletin to the rest of them. Right? And I think that your question kinda comes from, okay. Well, what if I just, like, you know, had, a playlist or a tag that I can just say, tag this first floor.

Any zones that are tagged first floor, just also get it. Right? Which should make that life a little bit easier. I'd say that we hear that from time to time. We have some plans kinda focusing on, like, multiple buildings for sure.

But, again, I would say just like just like Tang from before, like, the more information we get and the more requests we get for something is what's more likely to show up in the software. So I'll write that down. But if you also don't mind, if you are a current customer, to send a email to the support team and just kinda say that you would like something like that. But if you're not a current customer, I will, submit the idea too as well just to prioritize it.

Alan asks okay. Perfect. You are current for regional posts. Yeah. And I think we we do see that question quite often. So, yeah, if you could I'll still submit it, but if you could don't mind making a support ticket and just kinda bring that through.

There yeah. Without getting into road map, which just as as an organization, we are we wanna move in the direction of of providing more clear road maps into the future. One of the things four twenty six that I can speak to at a very high level is continuing to invest in mid to enterprise tooling. So there are there are particular features and functionality that we see in especially our corporate and higher education customers that are a particular size and larger that that all would really benefit from a set of tools that that are definitely on the road map.

And so as you're kinda talking about, like, tagging and regions and thinking about, again, a smaller group of people managing large groups of assets or billing or a lot of these different things that come at scale, there are definitely going to be investments in twenty twenty six from a product perspective that make that easier and give you a little bit more power. So without getting into all the details and, yes, anytime that you have an idea like that, as Colin has been saying, if you send them into our support queue, we have a very, very clear process for tagging feature requests and putting them into groups and and those types of things.

It's very helpful to us because we definitely wanna base it on what we're hearing from our customers.

Alan asked if we can touch base on how, Power BI can be used in in, Carousel. So Carousel has a has a direct integration with Power BI, which is authenticated, which is huge. Right? So, essentially, with inside Power BI, you would make a service a service principal account that Carousel would use to access those reports you'd wanna put on a screen. Then inside Carousel, you would depict which workspace, which report, and which bookmark or page of that report you wanna display. And then you have a choice if you want that to be live or every fifteen minutes. And that's important because Power BI charges you on capacity units.

Kind of how that gets leveraged is people will usually make a report in Power BI, and they want it on a screen so that the people that are physically there can, like, respond to those changes. Right? So just know that we kinda make that integration. We display your report. The report's authenticated and encrypted all the way to that screen, and then that can be something that's live for something like a production area, something that's every fifteen minutes for just, like, board stats or something like that. You kinda set that up once, and then we'll just keep updating the report as it changes in Power BI.

Brian brought up that their last three Brightson upgrades went smoothly, but the fourth one had an issue. And I think that kind of pinpoints that we still live in the real world. Right? And not everything is perfect all the time. Right?

And, of course, that's kind of a BrightSign issue, not necessarily a carousel thing. But, I mean, Scott, if you don't mind kind of talking, like, sometimes we'll get calls or tickets that are BrightSign specific. And as long as it's hardware we support, we sometimes can can, like, start at least the general troubleshooting of it.

Yeah. I think we do our very best to to be as helpful as we can to the point where, you know, is is reasonable within the, you know, the two ecosystems there for sure.

Absolutely. So, yeah, I would say that for for most of the I would say that I never do the, like, like, the beta firmwares. I always do the the, you know, full release. I don't know. Brian, I'm assuming you just did the full release and it happened. So, if you do have issues with your hardware, you can always come to us first too. We can usually at least get you in the right spot or start a communication with BrightSign.

Let's go through here. Will there be any way to specifically run a scene or scenes at a specific time of day?

So we do have, like, a this is where I want us to improve our scheduling for sure. Because you can definitely say, like, just play this on Monday or just play this next Tuesday. Right? That's gonna be in your either full screen alert scheduling or your channel scheduling.

However, we don't have, like, a really good recurring schedule, like, top of the hour, right, or play once every two hours or just play it every other Monday. And I think that scheduling is another big thing we wanna look at and improve in the twenty twenty six. So, again, Antonio, I would almost wrap all your ideas into one big email either to us, and we can look at that there as well. Scott put in the Power BI link for Alan.

Michael says customer here, we will be are we able to build custom apps on Carousel? Actually, so a little bit behind the scenes, we actually tried that before we moved to cloud. And then when we moved into cloud, we got a little bit scared scared about it. But I I would like to see in the few like, we obviously have the API.

It would be really kinda cool to at least have a, like, an option in the future where we could do, like, like, an API bulletin where you can at least say where you wanna call things. But as far as custom maps go, it's something that our engineers were actually pretty stoked about trying. I think we got someplace. I think that we had to stop and really make sure that our security was up up to snuff before we we really opened up a lot of that the back end tooling.

But, again, as always, submit sort of your ideas for that, and we'll always bring it Antonio asks, is there going to be a way to do interactive activities within a user who is watching that can interact with it, like using a Roku to choose a selection?

So I don't have anything planned for that. Right? We do have the Carousel app, which does have links that people can interface with.

But I've also heard, like, just the ability to, like, have the Apple TV remote or Roku Stick, like, go back and forth even on bulletins just to kind of, you know, pace that on their own.

But no no plans at this time.

Tang asks, are there any best practices on how to configure full screen alerts to be used with an ex integration to external systems using the CAP protocol? Literally, my favorite topic of all time. I've set up quite a few of those.

There are best practices. We do have we have improved like, the people on our side, on our support side, have actually done some training and actually set those things up now with users as far as our pro package.

I think the best the best practices is really going to be listing what your emergency alerts are, but then also realizing if multiple ones of them come at at one time, like, which one should be higher priority. Right? Because you might if you have, like, a tornado and a fire, you might want one or the other. I think there's actually some there's actually, like, a reason why you do one or one more than the other.

There are best practices. I don't know if we produce, like, a specific best practice. I would almost make sure that you talk through with your EMS provider for what their ideas are because they're, like, in that realm. But as far as setting it up and making sure that it's gonna function correctly, I'd reach out to the support team, if you have some concerns or if you're looking to go down that route.

And it is included, and it is part of the subscription.

Do and then the last question that we have so far from Alan is, do we have a one eight hundred number for tech support, or is it just email only? Scott can kind of answer this, but, basically, it depends on your support plan. Right? Because that's kinda where the cost the subscription cost comes in. I'll let him answer that question.

Yeah. Alan, I'll I'll send you a email after this. It does depend on your subscription level for sure, but I'll I'll send you an email after this with more details on that.

That's awesome. I think that's probably the most questions I've answered in a webinar. So I am I think that's pretty cool. And I also like the the insights for, like, features, things you're looking for.

Right? Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know, so submitting those makes those possible. I think that even, like, Power BI came from that sort of same thing. Right?

Our Carousel daily app that people can use their phones to get content also came from a need, right, to get things out there. So we really wanna make sure that in twenty twenty six, we're focusing on improving the product for the users because without users, you know, software doesn't have a meaning. So let us know when you have those ideas, and we'd be happy to to prioritize those. Yeah.

And I would add on to that. You know, I think, Michael, for example, on on yours around building custom apps, the more that you guys can give a little bit of story or how the use case of it, this is super helpful to us because we might read that in a particular way, and it might not be what you mean.

So if you if you are willing to share with us in our support some ideas on how you would like to see those features used and and what you're trying to accomplish with those, super helpful to us, and we'd really appreciate it.

Alright. I haven't seen a new oh, there we go.

Right. And I think that the like, if we really break that down, Ross, like, that statement, right, that's a hundred percent correct. And as long as it's, like, towards that goal of, like, like, solving communication gaps, right, if you have a piece of software and then you hit a gap and then there isn't a reward for you to continue to use the software, I would say that the nice thing about a lot of CMSs being subscription based and that the hardware is fairly agnostic within the ecosystem is that if if a service doesn't quite live up to your your new requirements and you don't use it, you could easily switch to another provider without switching out your hardware.

Right? So I think that now more than ever, the CMS providers have a have a much, you know, even bottom line incentive, right, to make sure that the it's improving beyond just, like, our feel good. Like, we want customers to feel happy. I think that there is a bottom line, that we need to watch out for to make sure that we're still providing useful and, new tools to achieve those goals.

Perfect. I haven't seen a new question in over five minutes, so I think that we'll end it here. Thank you all who are still here and asked all those questions. A special shout out to Alan, Antonio, and Ross for being so engaged and helping us move this along, and all the current customers that, watch us. So thank you so much for your time, and we'll see you next year.

Thanks, everyone.

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