Enterprise Signage Made Simple

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Alright. We're we're at one o'clock. So hopefully more folks are joining, but we'll go ahead and get going. So thank you all for joining our enterprise signage made simple webinar. My name is Dusty Dory. I am the chief revenue officer for Carousel Digital Signage, and joining us today is David Lubinski. David, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. First of all, let me thank you for the opportunity to join your webinar. Quite excited about it.

Name is David Lubinski. I am a senior product manager at Amazon, part of our devices organization. Been with Amazon for roughly eight years, and I've been focused for the last two years specifically on digital signage.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining. We're really happy to have you here and to talk about digital signage, let's get going.

Alright. So today, we will be spending some time focusing in on the intersection of IT and teams that manage digital signage. Sometimes they're the same, but oftentimes we find that they're collaborators within an organization. Today, we'll be highlighting how Carousel and Amazon can help reduce friction and simplify that collaboration at all stages of your project project.

Digital signage can mean a lot of things. For our purposes today, we're mainly focused on common internal or customer facing communication use cases, such as corporate offices, higher ed institutions, or k twelve institutions who may have a myriad of different different messages and media that they want to convey through the screens in their environments.

We'll highlight some specific tools of consideration or topics of consideration and solutions where the combination of Amazon Signage six and Carousel can be particularly useful, in these cases.

Alright. So we're really excited about the collaboration with Amazon that we've had already. I don't think anybody is more excited about this than our chief operating officer, John Reilly. I have his quote there on the screen when we asked him about it.

When we look at the industry, we see that the responsibility for costs of digital signage, as well as just the responsibility of managing it are falling on IT more than ever.

Amazon is filling a market gap by lowering the cost of hardware without the risk of shadow IT using consumer devices that aren't up to the task.

David, I'm wondering what what are your thoughts, on where you see Amazon fitting in the industry today?

Everything you said resonates very clearly with with me. I mean, we entered this market because we felt a really strong need to come up with a robust hardware solution at an affordable price with a with a trusted brand behind it and with the ability to scale.

I'll get into a little bit more detail on specifically what led us into the market a little bit later in in our conversation. I'll also cover some of the things that we've launched since our initial launch that I think, you know, really demonstrates our commitment to leadership in the digital signer space.

Awesome. Looking forward to it.

Alright. So, obviously, I have a stake in digital signage. But having started my career in IT, the concerns of today's IT administrators is not lost on me.

When we think about bringing a solution like digital signage into a new environment or maybe replacing and modernizing an existing deployment, it can raise a lot of concerns for those responsible for the security and functionality of associated systems and the network.

So how do we simplify things and reduce friction between the teams responsible for managing the content on the screens and those responsible for the hardware or the networks?

I think step one personally is being aware of the concerns and considerations. That'll be our top goal for today, really is to create that awareness and to foster those conversations between teams.

So being proactive in providing secure tools and integrations necessary to maintain a secure system is paramount. Beyond that, providing the resources and access to enable all parties to interact with the tools in a way that best fits their roles, helps ensure that the right people have what they need to do their jobs and the right access to complete their tasks without unnecessarily burdening other teams.

And of course, highly available by running on industry leading services like Amazon Web Services doesn't hurt.

But I'm certainly happy to talk about Kerasol in that context more, and we're gonna dig into each of those areas in more detail. But at a high level, when we think about the interplay here of hardware and software, Carousel really is only one piece of that puzzle.

David, would you like to talk about how you see Amazon filling the gap for both hardware and device management briefly?

Yeah, sure. You know, one of the biggest complaints that we hear on a regular basis from customers and partners alike is the growing total cost of ownership of both deploying and expanding digital signage footprint. Customers are dealing with expensive commercial displays. On top of that, there's the cost of the media player and the CMS subscriptions.

If you throw in the cost of dedicated IT to manage and or the dreaded truck roll to to surface the screen, it can become prohibitively expensive to to really expand. So we're we're helping bring down the costs with very affordable, like I said, affordable and reliable hardware.

We also recognize that remote management is a key part of keeping those costs down. And we'll get into the details of what we're doing specifically with device management a little bit later in the slide.

Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. Alright.

So let's dig in a bit more about Carousel's place in the solution as as the CMS, that that piece to the puzzle.

So when we think about how Carousel can alleviate the challenges for an organization collaborating, to support digital signage in their environment, there's one area that I think gets overlooked a lot, and that's that IT needs to wear a lot of hats.

I don't think anyone wants to add more to IT's plate these days, than is strictly necessary because of that. There are a number of ways that we think about helping an organization manage this, but one big way is by empowering IT to delegate authority and access to the right people to manage the content while still being confident in the security of their environment and the devices and and knowing they can manage that deployment efficiently. We can help support that in a number of ways, starting with user management. This is a big one.

First and foremost, we recognize that a large organization may have different people who need to interact with their digital signage in different ways.

Carousel enables an organization to create as many users as they need to accomplish this. We we don't wanna nickel and dime customers on on things like the number of users they have in a system.

That just leads to friction where an organization ends up wasting time creating and deleting users, playing a game just to get things done because somebody's out of the office on leave, and they happen to have used up their five user accounts that are allowed in in their system. We don't do any of that.

We allow unlimited users to achieve your objectives.

Then we extend that user management into the type of granular control that's needed to allow IT to administer and to manage setup, to create and manage critical integrations, but at the same time having different sets of users privileged to create content and workflows, designed to manage that content. So this allows an organization to efficiently distribute the work to the right people while maintaining the integrity of their system and the content that ends up on the screens.

Beyond trying to make sure that we can get the right users the right access, Carousel works to make sure that everyone's lives are easier by integrating with common secure authentication tools. So the SSO systems, that you and IT or that your organization's already using are part of your security and compliance protocols today are going to work with Carousel. The processes that you may have in place for granting or revoking a user's access will translate to Carousel without surprises.

It's also worth mentioning on the security front that Carousel is also SOC two type two compliant ourselves, and we take security very seriously.

Being able to get everything set up, users logged in, is great, but we do also recognize that there are other pieces to the puzzle. Other considerations we want to highlight that help ease adoption of Carousel in an organization, include training and support that is integrated and available to all Carousel, subscriptions, as well as a creative library, which is full of content like channels, templates, icons that are going to help get you going.

Or for our pro and enterprise customers that might be working with our creative services team on custom channels and content, you can use this as a reference point to get things going.

Beyond that, integrations with tools like dynamic content are going to help ease the burden of keeping your content fresh and up to date.

Lastly, but still extremely important, integrating with emergency alert tools such as the Common Alert Protocol is going to reduce one more concern for an organization that has a robust security and safety posture.

Alright. So we can't talk about digital signage and not talk about players.

Carousel works with a myriad of player types. You may already be familiar with many of them. You may have many of them in your organization today. But the opportunity that we have today is to talk about a player that's new and creating a lot of buzz.

So, with that, David, I'd love to hear more about the Amazon Signage Stick.

Sure. Happy to, Dusty. I thought I'd start off by giving you a little bit of history as to how and why we we entered this market. So so SignageStick, as you probably know, is based on Fire TV four k max hardware.

It's a consumer product that is time tested. It's a robust piece of hardware.

We've, we first launched it, the Fire Stick in twenty fourteen and since have sold over two fifty million of them worldwide. It's rock solid hardware. And while I can't share specific MTDF data with you in the meantime between failure data, I can tell you that the likelihood of this hardware failing is extremely, extremely small.

Now we we first entered the the digital signage space with an enhanced version of the Fire Stick as an internal project.

We if you walk into any Whole Foods store today, anywhere in the US, you'll see screens hanging from the ceiling. Those are all in fact being powered by an early version of the SignUpStick.

Been a tremendous success for us. We've learned a lot and have taken those learnings to enter the B2B market. Around the time that we were developing that solution for Whole Foods, we really started to take notice of a growing number of CMS apps that were appearing on our consumer Fire TV app store.

Along with this growing number of CMS apps were reviews calling out some of the shortcomings of of the solution using Fire Stick as a digital signage solution in a business place.

So we we scoured these reviews and categorized them into basically three buckets. One of them, provisioning and setup process. Two, the lack of remote management.

And three, a potentially disruptive OTA update process, all of which are not kind of nonstarters for a successful digital signage player in a business environment.

So we set out to develop a purpose built platform, leveraging the hardware, but we completely revamped the operating system.

We completely streamlined the provisioning process where you can literally get a stick up and running within within a matter of minutes, installing only what is necessary to to become a robust signage player.

We also added things like a kiosk mode to prevent any unwanted tampering once a signage is is deployed in retail space, for example.

We we also developed a strong and robust back end where through a portal, can literally see all the sticks that you have installed in your organization and get real time updates on excuse me, real time updates on the on the status of any of the sticks. We also incorporated some rudimentary remote management in that portal where you could in addition to seeing the status, you could do a remote factory reset or restart of the stick. So no need to go on prem to to do those, which is a nice feature.

We we also revamped the OTA process.

Couple of things we did there. One, OTAs when necessary. OTA updates either to the operating system or to the individual CMS APK. It'll only get done between the hours of two AM and five AM, so nondisruptive to normal business hours. We also will automatically download the package before it gets installed, not disrupting playback at all. So when the time comes to actually install them, the disruption literally is two or three seconds flash of the screen and it's right back to a full screen kiosk mode for the player.

So if you look at those those things that we did to really create a purpose built solution and you you couple those with our, you know, our world class fulfillment capabilities.

Where you can literally order any number of sticks that you want, and they're at your doorstep or your place of business, most cases within the next day.

So you combine all that together, and we were convinced when we first launched and remain convinced today that we really are successfully filling a much needed gap with a reliable, reliable, affordable, and scalable solution today with the sign of stick.

Jump to the next slide. Yeah. So we launched it in fourth quarter of twenty twenty four, first early version of it.

Instant praise from customers, partners, and press as well. In fact, there's one quote, I actually keep it pinned to my wall here as inspiration. It's from Digital Times Today, and it says this is about the signage stick. It's plug and play simplicity, improved reliability, and ease of use ensure that businesses can deploy impactful visual communications without technical anxieties, which, you know, I'm sure that's music to most of the people on the call's ears, and we couldn't have written it any better ourselves. It's exactly what we were looking for.

After launch, we did in fact start to get some very meaningful feedback, particularly from some of the larger organizations that while they were singing praise about how streamlined the provisioning process was now, they did say that as streamlined as it is, it's a linear it was a very linear approach.

So, you know, if you're if you're deploying a couple of sticks, even, you know, ten, twenty, it's it's doable. But if you're looking at dozens, hundreds, it can be extraordinarily time consuming.

So what we did was we responded with a mobile app that was very much geared towards I'm sorry, please excuse me for one second.

Very much geared towards bulk provisioning. And the way that that works is we leverage the Bluetooth beaconing on the stick. And so you can power on as many sticks as you want all within Bluetooth range of the app. They don't have to be connected to a screen. So you can get a row or multiple banks of power power banks, plug them all in, launch the app, scan for sticks, and all the unprovisioned sticks will appear.

Select the ones that you wanna provision, and a couple of steps where you just specify your WiFi credentials, the CMS that you want to install, hit go and sit back and watch watch the bulk provisioning take place.

You can also at that point, save these settings as a profile. So in a subsequent roll out, you don't even have to enter the credentials or the CMS, just use a profile, sit back, go grab a coffee, come back and have all your sticks provisioned.

We also included some, again, rudimentary remote management, largely to maintain parity with the portal that I described earlier. So from the app, you can get instant status of all the sticks that you have deployed online and offline. You can also do a factory reset, a restart. You can also create locations as a nice way of organizing where your sticks are. These are nondestructive tags, so, you know, you can wouldn't inadvertently delete a location and keep the sticks. The sticks would remain intact.

Yeah. So very successful. Again, got wonderful praise from partners, from consumers alike. But as usual, we gathered feedback and took it quite seriously. The biggest piece of feedback was the need for more remote management.

And while being able to restart and reset is great, there are a myriad of other features that the customers and partners, systems integrators, resellers were all clamoring for.

So with that, we set off to develop an API, which in fact launched last month and includes features like the ability to turn a display on and off via HDMI CEC commands, the ability to monitor CPU utilization and temperature, storage and memory levels, WiFi signal strength.

You can even take screen grabs of what's in the HDMI buffer to for proof of play purposes.

Now we we really debated internally whether to add these features into our app, into our portal, or use an API, deploy them through an API and let partners like Carousel implement them. And we opted for the latter just because we believe that it'll create a more kinda better user experience where they can get everything in one place. And I gotta say, I I don't think I've mentioned this to you before, Dusty, but I was looking at your implementation of PowerSave, where you is that right? PowerSave?

Is that the term? Yep. Yeah. So you've integrated the API to be able to turn displays on and off, and you've created a nice schedule so you can select them all, tell exactly what time they go on and off.

And, you did a really nice job. So, yes. Maybe next slide. I think we're good here.

Well, yeah. And just real quick, our engineering team has really enjoyed working with Amazon on this project. The the APIs provided by Amazon allowed us to go from proof of concept like you're talking about to to product really, really quickly. You guys have been fantastic to work with, so I look forward to more of that collaboration.

Yeah. Thank you, and likewise.

So this slide, you know, calls out some of, examples of our deployments that I think really speak to flexibility of the signage stick, and you can see here it covers a wide range of of verticals.

The one on the far left is University of Utah.

They've got signage sticks deployed throughout the campus, including this awesome one that's in the picture there. It's this fifteen foot wide display. It's an L shaped display. So surfaces on both sides, and it really creates this wonderful immersive experience. And it's being driven by three signage sticks.

The middle one is Penn Entertainment. And for that one, I think it really speaks to the confidence that customers have of the Cynostick, you know, especially operating in a demanding environment like a casino.

And of course the last one, Whole Foods, that's really what set us off on this exciting journey.

So pass it back to you, Dusty.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, David. That's really exciting to hear. The excitement has been been felt throughout the organization. Like, as I mentioned, engineering and ourselves, and I have mine running here as well.

So so we touched on device management quite a bit there, which is super exciting to hear about. I love seeing the deployment and having gotten to use it myself. It's really exciting to see what Amazon has developed for device management already through your own tools as as well as what you've enabled through APIs for CMS, like Carousel to to integrate. So bringing features like PowerSave directly into Carousel, is certainly gonna help organizations streamline the basic device management tasks that that go on day to day. And, again, that collaboration between the IT teams and your content management teams that just need to keep things moving, along the way. So Yeah.

Please, please keep the feedback coming because You know, this is version one of the API.

And, you know, based on feedback, we probably look to expand beyond, beyond what we offer today. So keep it coming.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Thank you.

Alright. So as I believe I mentioned before, that intersection of digital signage and IT is one that's close to my heart.

With that in mind, Carousel tapped into its twenty five plus years of digital signage expertise and produced a guide that is designed to help streamline collaboration and conversation, of teams within an organization that might be trying to navigate bringing in or maybe just modernizing a digital signage solution.

So with that, we invite you to follow the link in the chat, to download that when you have a chance.

This guide expands on topics discussed today and is based on our experiences with thousands of digital signage projects. We believe this guide will provide a solid framework and discussion topics that will help reduce the friction that often comes up, during a digital signage deployment.

Alright. So Claire, think you had a message.

At you, Claire, you might be on mute.

Yeah. We're going to launch a poll.

Everyone should be able to see it now.

And we'd love to follow-up with you according to what makes the most sense for you. So please fill out the poll accordingly. We will be talking about commonly asked questions. So if you have specific questions, be sure to fill out the poll accordingly, and we can follow-up with you.

Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for jumping in there with that.

So with that, David, you know, we're we're about twenty five minutes in, so we're we're doing really good on time here. But we have some time, and before we go, I was wondering if we could address some frequently asked questions.

Yeah. Sure. Happy to.

Awesome. Alright. Claire, Mitch, I think one of you had those for us.

There you go. Hey, there we go. Alrighty.

All right, first question. Can you share any insights into the future of signage stick capabilities?

That's a that's a tricky one because at Amazon, we we shy away from in fact, we're instructed not to reveal anything that we have not yet released.

But you know, that said, think kind of broadly speaking, kind of touched on version one of the API and looking for feedback. So that's one area that if you had to predict would probably be a good prediction. But just also in general, if you look at and we launched the stick, followed up with a mobile app, a couple of iterations of the mobile app, followed by the remote management API.

It I think it really does demonstrate that we're we're here to stay and, yeah, look forward to more innovation. And, you know, the world is being taken over by AI, so who knows? Maybe that'll find its way into some of our products.

Absolutely. Is the SignageStick SOC two compliant?

Okay. Short answer is no.

Let me expand on that a little bit without revealing anything because we don't talk about futures. We do recognize that that SOC two is an important part of especially going going upscale, more enterprise solutions.

We do recognize that, and we are serious about penetrating that market. So I'll pause there. Go to the next question.

Absolutely.

Let's switch over to the mobile app. How does the mobile app help add new devices to your existing rollouts?

The the wonderful thing about, you know, digital signage, you can really mix and match if you have existing players no matter whether they're, you know, Nooks or BrightSign or sign of sticks, you're free to to mix and match. And as you see fit, know, what we're we're actually seeing quite a bit of in some of our installations is customers that have large deployments with, you know, pretty expensive thin clients. As these thin clients age out, they are looking to solutions like signage stick to replace them with, and they can continue to operate with thin clients and just kinda incrementally cut over. So I think that's one of the great benefits of this simple, affordable solution.

Absolutely. And let's see.

Real real quick, Mitch. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. I just wanted to say that that is one of the things that we are seeing and and where a lot of the buzz is coming from is existing customers. The ease of being able to get their hands on a signage stick and just try it out is leading to a lot of that buzz on those questions. And, yeah, throw them in Carousel that you can absolutely take the the signage you're doing today and put it on the signage stick.

Sorry. Go ahead, Mitch.

Yeah. What happens when the signage stick needs updates or patches across hundreds of displays?

Yeah. So we we talked about our revised OTA update process. Process. And, you know, whether it's it's one stick or thousands of sticks, we've at Amazon, we've got a a few servers, and we're we're we're able to deploy quite rapidly. And the nice thing is you're not just limited to updating the OS for security patches, for example. If Carousel has an APK update, we can just push that update without touching the rest of the OS. So it's really been thought through and very much catered towards a business environment.

And is it okay to begin adding signage sticks to an already existing environment?

Yeah. No. Absolutely. Like I said Again, without getting into a lot of detail, we're seeing that with existing customers, but also some efforts internally to to move towards SignUpStick, which is a mix and match of of existing and new hardware. So, yeah, it's definitely a a highlight.

Great. I've got one final question for you. And Dusty, feel free to chime in here if you want. Where do you see Amazon signage sticks being a good solution as a digital signage player?

That's a that's a that's a good question. And, you know, you can tackle that in a number of different ways. You can try to slice it and dice it by verticals saying, hey. We're a great solution for higher ed or k through twelve or hospitality.

We kinda like to look at it as being use case driven. You know?

If your use case doesn't require kinda interactivity or, you know, a

Fifty foot video wall, then we're a great solution whether you're, you know, a two person or two screen mom and pop shop right through to a two thousand screen organization. We we really cover that spectrum as long as kind of the use case falls within what we do, and we do it well.

Yeah. Absolutely, David. You hit the nail on the head. And we're actually seeing that that is the the heart and soul of our of our digital signage deployment is is a lot of those use cases, and I think that's why we're seeing so many existing customers gravitating towards it, trying it out because it works really well for your day to day corporate, higher ed, k twelve signage needs. We're really seeing it being adopted quickly, in those use cases.

Alright. Well, Mitch, I think you said that was the last question we had. One thing that I noticed in your answers there, David, just to to summarize a little bit, it sounds like Amazon is moving quickly with alacrity in in developing the solution and and adding and changing things quickly. Was just taking some notes there as you were talking, and, you know, I'm certainly gonna be keeping my eyes open to see what happens every week, month, year as this goes on. Seems like you're releasing new stuff all the time. So it's exciting to watch and to and to be a part of.

And then, you know, I think we're gonna have the video for download. Mitch made sure to send me a note about that. And just a reminder, you know, download the guide. We really do think it's gonna help expand on the topics today and and help guide some discussions internally for those teams that are collaborating on their digital signage projects.

Cool. Awesome. Right. Well, thanks again, Rusty, for for the opportunity to join your webinar. It's been lots of fun.

Yeah. Thank you for joining us joining us. Getting a little parched. Alright, folks. Anything else?

Well, with that, thank you all, have a great rest of your day.

Thank you. Take care.

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