On-going and recurring costs will include:

• software and licensing renewals
• replacing/upgrading displays, mountings, players and software
• service contracts
• labor for cleaning/replacing displays
• IT administration/management

Displays – The Most Visible Part of Digital Signage

The primary hardware components of a digital signage network, and the easiest to identify the prices of, are the displays.

Displays for use in digital signage will cost more to buy than the ones you would buy for use as computer monitors or home television/theater installations. However, consumer-class displays won’t have the required robustness or features of commercial-class display, which are built to run 12 to 24 hours a day; be controllable via RS-232 or a network connection; be able to run in hot, dusty environments; and have cooling fans that can work either landscape or portrait orientation.

“Consumer”-oriented displays won’t suffice for most digital signage applications; indeed, using one in this fashion often voids the vendor warrantee. So expect to pay more for your displays than for a comparable-size home-TV consumer display – and understand that a consumer-class display would end up costing your more and wouldn’t do the job right.

Prices for commercial-class displays for digital signage start under $500, like NEC’s recently-announced 32-inch E323. At the higher end, NEC’s 55-inch Series/3M iCOMPEL Touchscreen LCD can run around $6,000.

(Touch displays, or adding an aftermarket touch overlay to an existing display, typically doubles the overall cost of the display.)

Commercial display prices also depend on the expected duty cycle; i.e., do you expect it to be running 8, 12, 16 or 24 hours a day?

Costwise, in addition to the display proper, each display requires a mount, whether it’s a wall or ceiling mount, or for a floor or window. Mounts can run anywhere from under $100 to $1,000 and above. Since you don’t want your display falling out, you want to make sure you get an adequate one, in terms of specs and manufacturing quality.

“Mount pricing depends on where it goes,” says Black Box’s Langbein. “Is it going into a concrete wall? A wall with studs?” Ceiling mounts can cost up to four times that of a wall mount, Langbein notes, “since a ceiling mount usually requires an additional plate to hold the weight.”

Other Hardware to Budget For

You’ll also need one or more players, which are computers that provide the content to displays.

Players are basically purpose-built computers, costing anywhere from a few hundred to one thousand dollars each; how many you’ll need depends on how many displays you have, and how complex and different the content you want on the displays. The players may work from content provided on SD cards, USB flash drives, or CD/DVD disks, or from content delivered by the network.
Like any computer deployment, digital signage requires power and network infrastructures. Power is for the displays, players, and possibly for ventilation. In terms of networking, depending on the location, you may be able to (and may need to) do networking via 802.11 Wi-Fi or even via cellular broadband, versus standard CAT5 cabling.

The big cost for power and networking isn’t the actual cabling, of course; it’s going to be t
he labor to plan and put the cabling in place.

Content Management and Priming Your Content

The content shown on a digital sign can be as simple as a static display of text and images, or a repeating “loop” of a “slide show” or of a video clip. Or it can be an elegant, sophisticated, dense mix (like what you often see on displays at airline terminals or in bars), combining static text and images, video clips, “crawls and feeds” for weather, news and announcements, and other information incorporating graphics, transitions and other visual effects. This content is managed by (and may have been created by) a digital signage content management system (CMS).

Depending on the nature of the data (pre-existing, live, or both), how many displays are involved and whether those displays are all showing the same versus different data, content may be sent to the display from a small “player” computer, taking data from a local SD card, hard drive, or solid-state drive – or over the network from a central CMS. (Cloud-based digital signage content management services are also available.)

Many digital signage vendors offer free basic content management tools, and there are numerous digital signage CMS software products and suites available, from companies like Four Winds Interactive, X2OMedia and Scala.

Applications like “wayfinding” will also require an initial investment to create the database of maps and directions, and maps and directions have to be custom-done for each site.

Labor: Be Prepare to Buy Time

Your digital signage displays will need to be installed and maintained, and so will the network and content. This means on-going time from IT and Facilities, along with electricians, carpenters, painters, etc. As your requirements get better defined, Facilities (or whoever is responsible for providing the various laborers) should be able to supply rates and rough estimates for each piece of the deployment.

“For our system it is not just the cost of the display,” says St. Louis University’s Williams. “There is a cost of the signage content player, encoder/decoder (content is delivered to each display via our network), template design (each content channel has their own custom template), network jacks and power at each signage location. Typical deployment cost of our system is $12,000 to $ 15,000 per content channel (depending on size of display and template design). Ongoing service agreement cost if around $2,500 per channel, per fiscal year.”

As you can see, it is possible to ballpark the cost of digital signage: the overall deployment, and rough per-display/location costs…but only after you’ve nailed down what you’re doing.
And remember, while digital signage, like IT, like lights and power, and all other aspects of a facility, has costs, it also has reasons you’re doing it, and benefits. So don’t be looking just at the cost, also look at the value that your proposed digital signage will be providing.

 

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