Without the ability to monitor each sign in a digital signage network from a central location to confirm playback, achieving confidence in the performance of the network will be next to impossible.

One day when I was in college many years ago, I took my handy cassette recorder to class because I knew my professor was going to be covering some particularly important material that I would want to review in detail before my next exam.

That's not to say I wasn't well versed in the Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals and the finer points of outlining. It's just that for this particular class I wanted to get every detail. (I'm clearly showing my age. My college-aged kids turn to Blackboard and other online tools for notes and PowerPoint presentations of their professors' lectures.)

Imagine how disappointed I was when I returned home in the evening, rewound my cassette and for whatever reason there was no audio of the lecture. What I needed - although I didn't know it at the time - was the ability to do what audio engineers call "confidence monitoring." In other words, I needed the ability to listen via an audio jack and an earpiece to the actual audio as it was being recorded to tape.

Fast forward to today and to the topic at hand, namely digital signage networks. A critical element of effectively managing a digital signage network is the ability to monitor playback of scheduled content on each monitor in the network - sort of a visual confidence monitoring. For the digital signage network manager, having the ability to look across the entire network, which might stretch across a campus, throughout an arena, or even across the entire nation, to confirm playback makes the seemingly impossible quite doable and improves productivity of the entire enterprise.

Rather than relying on someone else who happens to be working within viewing distance of each monitor in the network to notice a problem and then report it to the digital signage network manager, a manager in the network operations center has the ability to view what's playing back on any given monitor in the network from the network operations center (NOC).

Often, the digital signage network software that makes this happen will display thumbnail images of multiple monitors, any of which can be enlarged with a simple mouse click. Frequently, the software also makes it easy for managers to group thumbnails in a logical manner. For instance, thumbnails of all of the monitors in a particular building, on a specific floor or in a certain type of application, can be assigned to the same group so that it's easy and convenient for a manager to confirm that all is well with any given grouping of monitors.

Confidence monitoring paired with software capabilities to log playback is particularly important for digital signage ad networks. For these networks, having the ability to prove to customers that advertising ran as scheduled on the network is essential. Similarly, monitoring playback and documenting those instances when an ad failed to run as scheduled gives the ad network the ability to schedule make-goods and in the process build and win the trust of customers.
 
More decades have passed than I care to admit from my first encounter with the consequences of not having adequate confidence monitoring, but the lesson is as relevant today in the realm of digital signage as it was back then with my broken cassette tape. Without the ability to monitor the performance of technology as it apparently goes about fulfilling its function, it is ultimately impossible to have confidence in that technology.