Shopping for a content-delivery tool for your digital signage can get tricky. With so many options and so many vendors, it’s difficult to accurately compare product offerings. Some are hardware-based; others use software-based authoring applications with media player devices that you attach directly to LCD or plasma screens.

And what you order might not give you what you want. You may, for instance, order the high-priced "streaming live” media player and discover it’s only good for playing video from a disc.

What you’re probably looking for is a digital signage player. Like traditional media players, digital signage players (sometimes called digital signage appliances) enable you to distribute video, graphics, and other types of media—including Web-based content, such as Flash animations and text tickers—to an attached screen. However, they’re more dynamic than conventional media players, providing you with a greater level of control in your digital signage or multimedia distribution application.

And they’re simpler to implement than a software-based system that gives you many of same capabilities, Software-type solutions typically require you to have one or more authoring workstations on a network, plus you might need a media player or similar remote device for every attached screen.

Digital signage players not only enable you to automate the delivery of content—even live TV and on-demand video and RSS news feeds from the Internet—they also often allow you to mix live content feeds next to static graphics in zones within a screen and have them update in real-time. They’re able to do this because they’re basically powerful PCs optimized for digital signage deployment. With spacious hard drives, powerful chips, large memory capacity, and sophisticated video capture cards and graphics processors, digital signage players have what you need for the streaming of simultaneous multiple video feeds and data-heavy Flash animations. Plus, if they’re Web-enabled, you can control the whole show over the Internet.

Media players, even the professional-grade models, offer fewer capabilities than digital signage players. That’s because they’re mostly data storage devices, with images and compressed video retained on an internal hard disk or on a plug-in memory card. They’re designed primarily for playing prerecorded content and don’t usually give you the creative tools to set up an elaborate mix of static and streaming media on-screen (which is mainly because of the limitations of the software included with the devices).

Content automated with fewer people behind the scenes.
Digital signage players particularly benefit organizations without the staff to customize and update content on a routine basis. Like any digital signage system, someone has to manage it, whether it’s an contracted digital signage advertising firm, a team of creative and technologically savvy in-house staff, or a single administrator who is proficient in a number of media and effectively becomes the wizard behind the curtain.

By integrating a number of features in one centrally controllable platform, a digital signage player or appliance makes the job of a single administrator easier. Typically basic design and scheduling software is preloaded on the box, so all you have to do customize the template themes with your logos, text, and video, and hook it to your digital signage system to begin streaming video. It's no longer necessary to cobble together multiple media players and multiplex their feeds for distribution.

What’s more, the task of updating digital signage content is made dynamic with digital signage players. Autofeeds can be preconfigured to run at scheduled times, but if the situation requires, the administrator can also step in and interrupt the flow, altering text captions, images, video, and other content on the fly, to stream the most up-to-date information to audiences.

An alternative to pricey software signage systems.
One drawback to digital signage players is their price. They have advanced functionality, so you can expect to pay more for digital signage players than for conventional media players. But because they enable you to do more with less staff and less time, and the end product is a professional digital signage presentation that reaches customers more effectively, they’re often a worthy investment.

Additionally, digital signage players are still not as expensive as most software-based content-distribution systems, which usually require you to buy a license for every user slated to run the authoring software, as well all the hardware and wiring underneath. (With a software-based system, not only must you have and maintain the authoring workstation PCs and the server database storing the video and images, you also need media players for each monitor and a high-bandwidth network infrastructure to link the components.)