FlyBoard®: Shaping the Digital Signage Landscape of the Future

With the number of devices, channels, and applications growing in number every passing day, content development, distribution, and consumption are also seeing a rapid change. In a highly-digitized, ever-changing business paradigm, enterprises are increasingly looking to leverage technological innovations to offer their customers hyper-personalized and immersive experiences. In that quest, the emphasis is on digital signage and information monitors.

The transition is easily noticeable in form of digital screens and boards replacing their predecessors at hotel lobbies, transit points, stadiums, and shopping malls. However, we have only scratched the surface of what new-age digital signage innovations are capable of. The new forms of information sharing and monitoring have the potential to disrupt operations across industries through more intuitive and interactive customer engagement initiatives.

Digital transformation is a perpetual process that has its share of challenges. With enterprises transitioning gradually, their digital strategies can often be fraught with issues arising from misanalysis of ground realities, business objectiveness, and digital readiness for the change. As a result, organizations commonly find themselves initiating the change and then realizing that they were not adequately equipped for the overhaul.

When it comes to signage and information monitoring, there are some pertinent challenges that enterprises are combating today. To begin with, the content boom is difficult to manage and optimize. With so much to be distributed across channels and devices, the ecosystem is now more complex than before. It is compounded by a mismatch between the hardware and the software. Unsecure wired and wireless connections are often prone to cyberattacks and malice. Interoperability is also a common pain point, with enterprises struggling to synergize software, hardware, platforms, formats, and OS.

Layout, design, and content delivery limitations of conventional signage methodologies prevent enterprises from seamlessly sharing information, offering the most relevant content, and advertising to the diverse customer groups. Also, traditional digital signage is devoid of cutting-edge analytics that can help enterprises gain real-time insights to understand the responses and effectiveness of their campaigns.

Forward-looking enterprises need a digital signage solution that not only mitigates the existing challenges, but also expedite their journey to the future of information sharing. At LTTS, we understand the enterprise pain points, scopes, and objectives. Having worked extensively with organizations across business domains and industries, and with a strong partner ecosystem to leverage, we have developed FlyBoard^® — a truly holistic digital signage solution that helps enterprises usher in the future of information monitoring and sharing. Unlike point solutions that address only specific issues, FlyBoard^® comprehensively elevates user experience and allows enterprises to unlock value at scale.

So, what makes FlyBoard^® stand out? We have brought in futuristic features that offer enterprises greater flexibility, agility, and versatility. To start with, it provides improved design and layout customization to create purpose-specific campaigns, the templates of which can be saved for future use. Similarly, the schedule-and-shoot feature helps enterprises create, manage, segment, and schedule campaigns according to their need, target group, and existing parameters. A centralized management and monitoring dashboard offers enterprises complete observability of the ongoing campaigns across geographies and real-time proof-of-play.

FlyBoard^® is content and network agnostic, meaning that enterprises can stream content of any format and across networks of varied speed and latency. It is also hardware and platform agnostic, implying that the content can be seamlessly streamed across various devices and platforms with ease. Finally, FlyBoard^® is designed to provide end-to-end network security through an authentication system for multitenancy. This ensures that the digital signage system is iron-walled against cyberattacks and threats.

FlyBoard^® is a futuristic solution that has already made the journey from being a concept to a value enabler. While most enterprises are still aligning their objectives with various inadequacies of the existing digital signage systems, a leading real estate group approached LTTS to engineer superlatively interactive and immersive visual experiences for their target audience. They needed uninterrupted content dissemination across a large number of digital screens and assets, and orchestration and monitoring of their display campaigns through a platform-agnostic solution. The objective was to achieve greater flexibility and availability, while ensuring secured content delivery.

To begin with, LTTS bundled FlyBoard^® with FlyBoard Lite^® for protocol-based direct streaming to connected displays across locations without needing to make software or hardware adjustments. This was particularly critical for streaming content in public locations where making configuration changes was tedious and time-consuming. FlyBoard^® combined Microsoft and Intel capabilities to address the needs of the client.

The solutions offered by FlyBoard^® included, but were not limited to:

• Offline mode to display continuous loop of information without network connection
• Platform-agnostic operation across OS and display types
• Cloud agnostic, multi-cloud, and on-premise deployment through headless server and containerized architecture
• Multi-network compatibility to operate on both open IP and satellite networks
• An integrated dashboard to manage all information across multiple networks or hardware types over a single platform
• Multicast streaming to enable streaming deployments by leveraging custom audio or video encoders
• Out-of-band management with the Intel vPro platform
• Web or dynamic content to support touch- and gesture-based interactivity
• Camera analytics integration to allow for varied use cases, such as visitor count and COVID-related activities
• Multi content type delivery for supporting multiple data types with multimedia support through a network-based architecture

The results were remarkable. With FlyBoard^®, the client achieved thoroughly seamless content distribution, even across remote and restricted locations. With targeted ad campaigns in multiple languages across a larger geography, the client achieved a greater scale. Improved flexibility also resulted in reduced time of service deployment and cost for the client. The integrated dashboard simplified operations and eliminated the need for frequent manual interventions. The most notable benefits included a 90% reduction of logistics cost and 50% reduction in operational cost.

As we collectively embark on the journey to the future of digital content distribution and visual experiences, partner with LTTS to deploy FlyBoard^® and tap into new business value and opportunities.