"Feeding the beast" refers to the insatiable content appetite of a digital signage (DS) system that's on 24/7. At first, many new users assume they'll have plenty of content to post in their DS system, but soon find out the constant need for more can be a ball and chain keeping them from doing more important work.
If you're thinking about starting up your own digital signage system, the amount of content you'll need is an important consideration.
Here’s a simple formula we developed which will help you get a good idea how much content you'll need:
Content Formula: (C/A) x B = D
A. # of pieces rotating = 6
B. # of days in month = 22
C. # of days exposure = 5
D. # of pieces per month = 18.3
In this example there are six pieces of content rotating at any given time, content changes only on business days (i.e., Mon – Fri), and each piece stays in rotation for five days. Based on this, 18 pieces of fresh digital signage content are needed per month.
This also assumes that your DS will display only one piece of content at a time. However, if your screen has two frames, double the final number (D); if three frames, triple it, etc. That’s a lot of content, especially if you want to make it specific to your organization as opposed to generic web news or entertainment feeds.
For our customers, we produce about 44 pieces of fresh, animated content per month, based on two content panels, and then they can decide how much of their own to add. We base this on the above formula, the amount of times a person needs to see an image before it sinks in, and the amount of time, per showing, that the image will be displayed.
The main objective with this, and any DS system, is to always make it engaging for the viewer ... whether you have time to administer it or not. Because when viewers start realizing that you have lame or repetitive content on your system, the readership will rapidly drop off. And once that happens, it's difficult to get them back.
