Creating compelling content from your digital signage system

Over the years I’ve met and spoken with enough content creators and users of digital signage software that I’ve come to realize that their needs generally boil down to one simple concept: a content management platform that is both reliable and simple to use (in that order), while simultaneously offering a wealth of value for the brand at hand.
Tools serve purpose; therefore, any organization that builds tools for the digital signage industry, such as a content management system (CMS), serves both themselves and their intended audience by digging deeper into the technical challenges surrounding compelling and engaging experiences.
A frustration felt amongst those we’ve spoken with, for example, is having to simplify content or produce it in an inconvenient way – just to meet the requirements of the tools being used to manage them.
This simply does not make sense to us at YCD. We believe that creative people should be unencumbered by the trappings of technology (within reason) when expressing themselves through their work. Tools should be made to accommodate their needs.
Using the ‘Canvas Approach’, the Cnario platform does just that. Not only does this innovative method manage playback across a set of screens or digital signage end points – it also allows the content creator to take a step back and look at the experience as a whole, it’s the difference between creating a painting against completing a puzzle.
Technically speaking, this tool provides the user with a single, homogenous, and cohesive Canvas to work with. This Canvas can and will include all of the digital signage end points involved in the experience, no matter their:

• Type (LCD, LED, projectors, etc)
• Size (mix and match resolutions)
• Orientation (landscape vs portrait)

As far as the creative people are concerned, they are simply building content in the total resolution of (you guessed it) a Canvas. The technical complexities of managing and synchronizing playback across numerous displays, players, or video outputs can simply be ignored. All the creative team would worry about is how to make the best impact on their audience.
An easy to imagine example of the Canvas approach is mixing and matching different content strategies. Let’s say that you wanted to play some pixel perfect ambient content across the entire experience, followed quickly by a transition, after which each digital signage element would act independently of each other. Keep in mind that each element could range in size from a single screen to an entire video wall (in any arrangement or size, and may include interactivity). For most other CMS providers, this would either be impossible or require development. In Cnario, this workflow can be achieved by two Sequences in a Playlist, playing one after the other. It really is that simple

In case you’re wondering, Cnario further enhances the capabilities of its Canvas tool by supporting an unlimited number of layers of content as well as alpha transparency for images, videos, and HTML5. Users are free to create an unlimited number of zones in any size and shape or layer – for their content to play back in. Interactivity (touch, motion, sensors, etc.) and third-party integration (systems, software, devices, etc.) is also fully supported by YCD’s open architecture and in depth APIs.
The bottom line to this blog is that deploying a solution with both the tools designed for creative purposes and the features to support them is the way of the future
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