SMART CITIES

When was the last time a video really grabbed your attention as you walked by? The increasing ubiquity of the medium in our common spaces means there’s a growing risk of it becoming mere background wallpaper.

Simon Carp recommends a solution to move past the ho-hum. “Instead of using video as a passive medium, treat it as a platform for digital engagement,” says Carp, the Head of Product Management for Uniguest, a provider of audio-video solutions. This means interactive digital signage and dynamic and informative content that can change how customers consume video.

Improving Engagement Through Interactive Digital Signage

It might seem like a no-brainer, but improving digital engagement requires video solution providers to deliver content that customers actually want, Carp says. That content needs to be fun, eye-catching, informative—or all the above.

For a high street retailer in Australia, rolling out dynamic content on screens is a perfect example of using eye-catching and engrossing video as a way of engaging customers. What started as fixtures at the ends of store aisles has expanded to window displays and even custom video at checkout counters. A bonus: The retailer sells advertising space on the platform, adding to revenue.

Through a combination of screens, no matter the location, Uniguest’s Tripleplay platform can help clients customize and deliver personalized content. The tools give customers the ability to essentially create their own channels of content, which is delivered to screens. Tripleplay technology enables more targeted customization of content. Personalization can extend down to an individual screen—a bank branch can add information about its customer service team, for example—or to various other displays.

Such an ability to scale content up or down is one of the significant advantages that Tripleplay delivers. “Customizing content and making it relevant and actually configuring it for hundreds if not thousands of screens is difficult,” Carp points out. “You can create a huge overhead in planning and configuration. But what we try to do is build tools into our technology that allows you to localize content for all these screens in a scalable way.”

Clients can deliver the dynamic content needed for engagement—at scale and through a single platform.

There’s a lot of #DigitalSignage out there, but the Tripleplay complementary suite of #technologies adds breadth and enables the end user to craft a legitimate and fully #digital engagement platform. @uniguest via @insightdottech

Interactive Media in the Workplace

It’s the behind-the-screen tools that help Tripleplay deliver implementations in a variety of markets.

The Tripleplay Reserva Edge solution, for example, is a digital meeting-room signage tool that helps employees schedule meetings and access other functionalities related to the management of space and equipment. The physical units are small, ready-to-use interactive display screens installed next to meeting areas in corporate and teaching spaces within university campuses.

Employees can use the Reserva Edge unit’s touchscreen to find out information about the facility’s usage a week or two in advance, and can book their own meetings. To make things more accessible, employees can perform the same functions anywhere through a mobile app. The tool requires attendance confirmation when the room is reserved so the space can be released to others when vacant. Using the Reserva Edge solution, employees can also alert maintenance about malfunctioning equipment and optionally alert other users of the space about potentially disruptive issues.

AI Driving Digital Engagement

Intel powers the hardware that underpins most of Tripleplay’s AV solutions, Carp says. The digital-signage media players and content management systems all run on Intel.

Uniguest uses AI selectively based on end use cases. Voice-to-text AI systems, for example, can transcribe meeting and lecture audio streams. Students can even search these lecture notes by keywords. AI can also be used to measure screen engagement: whether or not someone is looking at the screen (and for how long); and basic demographic information like age. The AI solutions follow privacy protocols by not personally identifying people but simply registering their presence, Carp says.

Collecting even basic demographic information will help Uniguest customers target their video campaigns even better. Customers could use audience measurement as a basis for their campaign planning and figure out what content they would want to advertise accordingly.

Future directions for video will include tools to accurately measure metrics, something Uniguest is working toward. “The big area of focus for us going forward is what we can do to measure engagement and provide insights back to the business to demonstrate the benefits,” Carp says.

Uniguest brings not just the video platforms and AV solutions to the table but also delivers ways of facilitating and managing the content. There’s a lot of digital signage out there, but the Tripleplay complementary suite of technologies adds breadth and enables the end user to craft a legitimate and fully digital engagement platform.

Carp sees a bright future for video. An increasing number of organizations want to communicate with people. Technology underpins that engagement; it helps companies beyond passive media to really engage their customers using dynamic and interactive media.
 

Edited by Georganne Benesch, Editorial Director for insight.tech.