Intel's Digital Signage Hopes To Deliver High ROI

Last week at its Channel Alliance Summit, the chipmaker laid out new plans to embrace technologies that it believes continue to evolve toward PCs. One area that Intel believes has tremendous upside for solution providers -- and the vendor, of course -- is digital signage.

In fact, the company is forecasting an annual growth rate of 26 percent each year until 2015, said Raj Maini, digital signage marketing managers for Intel.

“There’s a tremendous growth potential in digital signage,” Maini said. “We see several distinct opportunities where digital signage will come to dominate the market.”

Specifically, Intel is targeting three places where it believes digital signage will have the most impact: point of sale, point of wait and point of transit. Solution providers, according to Maini, will be key in creating, bundling and deploying digital signage solutions that will be built on Intel hardware.

“As hardware prices continue to drop there will be more opportunities for a return on investment,” said Maini. “There’s clearly a chance for software analytics to be bundled into signage sold by solution providers.”

Mani also showed off a proof of concept design to demonstrate the power of a fully integrated solution that could be sold to customers. Standing at his laptop, he loaded a software program that was integrated with his built-in camera. Several ads began to run in the program, one after another, and as Maini looked at the ad the software captured when he looked, for how long he looked, and whether he was a male or female.

“Working with Intel allows solution providers to offer remote manageability, energy efficiency and anonymous video analytics,” he said. “All of these factors will lead to a lower total cost of ownership and higher return on investment.”

As for the silicone required, solution providers can expect to begin building signage based on the familiar line of processors, the Core i7, i5 and Atom. Each Intel chip delivers different capabilities for customers. For example, an Atom processor would likely be able to handle remote management but it might take an i5 or i7 to really implement a software solution with anonymous video analytics.