"A chicken in every pot and a display on every wall." -Herbert Hoover
President Hoover was a prescient and oft-misquoted man. Fortunately for us, DMC has realized his vision of liquid crystal abundance. DMC's new office is full of displays. Displays on desks, displays on walls, and displays in pockets. With this embarrassment of riches comes great responsibility. A responsibility to create and stream high-quality promotional content to as many of the office's displays as possible with minimal infrastructure and at minimal cost.
Matt Puskala and I took on the task this FedEx Day to figure out the best platform for streaming content throughout the office. Matt and Ken Brey had previously investigated some video streaming appliances, and I also jumped the gun and previewed the one myself. Coming into FedEx Day, however, both Matt and I did not feel satisfied with any of these solutions.
As the hours began to pass during FedEx day, we became more convinced that our initial investigations had been fruitless. Turning to the last best hope of every frustrated engineer, we performed some googlemancing and found a promising solution called Media Signage.
Media Signage seemed to be ideal. It is free. The content is hosted on a server or in the cloud, and the client can run on both a PC and an appliance. The appliance is relatively inexpensive. And it has a great UI! What remained to be seen however was whether it would pass the acid test of FedEx Day and allow Matt and I to create and stream content before day's end.
Happily for us Media Signage passed with flying colors. Matt worked out how to stream the DMC blog's RSS feed using a custom RSS object and I laid out the content using the Media Signage UI. At the end of my first FedEx day we were able to demo our content to the DMC nomenklatura with great fanfare.
The question remains whether we will use PCs or appliances to feed the content to the office's displays. In either case we are happy with the Media Signage platform and look forward to creating more original content to stream.