Case Study: Improving Digital Signage In A Retail Setting

The customer’s digital signage often looked warped before Canopy provided a solution.

- In electronics stores around the world, one of the largest technology companies on the planet had a particularly pesky problem with its digital signs becoming distorted.

Most of the time, those digital signs displayed advertisements correctly. But, trouble would arise whenever the media players connected to those signs received an update to its operating system. When the update completed, the media player defaulted to the wrong screen resolution. In turn, this caused the advertising on the digital sign to became distorted and … weird.

Prior to working with Banyan Hills Technologies, this large technology company would only learn about the problems when someone would call to let them know that the digital sign at a potentially faraway store was not displaying an advertisement correctly. Once the company received this report, the technology company would attempt to log in to the media player via a remote desktop program or it would send a technician out to the store to change the resolution setting on the media player manually.

The solution

Enter Banyan Hills Technologies and its Internet of Things software platform, Canopy.

The technology company asked the team at Banyan Hills Technologies to find a way to fix the problems with the digital signs remotely and be able to monitor the hardware to make sure it functioned correctly. The latter request would mean the technology company would not need to rely on someone making a phone call to let them know about a problem.

The team at Banyan Hills Technologies installed its proprietary edge agent software, Leaf, on the media players connected to the digital signs. The edge agent then began transmitting data about the media players and the digital signs to an instance of the Canopy IoT platform operating in the cloud. From there, engineers could monitor the information from any location by simply logging into Canopy.

One of the first KPIs (key performance indicators) that the Banyan team created was one to monitor a digital sign’s screen resolution. At the same time, the Banyan team built an ‘action’ that could be executed remotely from within Canopy to fix the screen resolution when needed.

Adding automation

The team brought these two items together inside Canopy’s automation tool to create a workflow that could automatically fix a digital sign’s screen resolution anytime the software detected a problem.

At the same time, Canopy sends an email alert to a support team letting them know about the screen resolution problem and also creates a service ticket inside a system to document the situation.

Now, this large technology company uses Canopy to not only keep the screen resolution on the digital signs functioning correctly but also to address any other issues that might arise. If all else fails, the engineers can use Canopy to reboot the media player remotely and that often resolves the problem.

Analytics and more

Beyond monitoring the network of digital signs, this large technology company can also take advantage of Canopy’s Analytics module to gain even more insights. The analytics lets the team know about screen usage, patterns in screen outages and graphs with historical data.

In the meantime, the technology company’s advertisements look great and perform well in the big box electronics stores where customers shop for the latest gear and learn about products without being distracted by a distorted screen.