Android Powered Signage

[Troy210]

So my boss comes to me with an idea of wanting all the TV's in the company to be networked together to display company info like birthdays, memo's, company news, whatever. The problem is, our company isn't all in one central location. We're spread out over 7 different states, some states having multiple offices. we're talking about 12 TV's in total.

The boss is told from some Joe Blow who uses one of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XWM9B21/?tag=tec06d-20
And this guy uses Xibo: http://xibo.org.uk/docs/ And he claims to use this across his company. He shows me a screen shot of the app, and I notice he's only running 2 screens. Probably within the same building, on the same network. How would you do this across multiple networks?

 

[Kursah]

If that is cloud controlled, then they register to the service on Xibo's servers. You'd have to make sure the proper ports for said services were allowed. No different than other cloud-based solutions. Think of it as the server hosting the service is on the web, and all those devices connect to it, your WebGUI dashboard connects to it, and thus all of them.

I've used Android signage for schools before, and really I've been much happier with Google Chromecast solutions. Though depending on your needs, the software integrations for signage on Android allows for more complex deployments...but not necessarily better. There's some pretty good stuff for Chromecasts out there as well. Both going the manual route (one Chromecast per Chrome account) or services that use cloud-hosted solutions to manage multiple devices from a single interface.

 

[Troy210]

I was thinking Chromecast would work better as well. But this boss of mine listens to her Entrepreneur buddies more than her IT guy.

 

[flmatter]

But this boss of mine listens to her Entrepreneur buddies more than her IT guy

typical good idea fairy strikes again

 

[brandonwh64]

This is what I used at my old job. We had 48 inch tv's with ITX pc's

http://www.visix.com/

 

[Kursah]

I was thinking Chromecast would work better as well. But this boss of mine listens to her Entrepreneur buddies more than her IT guy.

Well a single Chromecast costs $35, you could always do a demo.

GreenScreen is a free GitHub solution that you could use to exercise how to utilize solutions. Depending on signage complexity and management this may or may not work, but is definitely worth a look. If you show a working solution, you can use that as an arguement for showing a solution you are already able to manage versus a solution her buddy suggested.

https://github.com/groupon/greenscreen

 

[Troy210]

Nice. Thanks for the insight guys.