Hi,
I have been managing digital signage advertising networks for almost 20 years. I have been using what is considered the “go to” software for this. I have managed over 5000 screens with that. I can tell you that it would be an incredible burden to do that with Xibo due to the overhead. Granted, I am no Xibo expert and I have only been using for a few weeks so maybe I am missing something.
I decided to try Xibo’s open source version for a simple project. I was able to get it installed on Docker using a Digital Ocean VPS and everything works fine so far.
Here are my comments so far:
Why can we not have a basic way of setting the display or display group’s opening hours so the screen just goes black or turns off and does play, count ads or impressions during that time? It would be crazy if I had to create a day part for every venue who’s opening hours are different.
Day Parts should be set on the display itself to differentiate when certain ads should play on that screen. For example, for a resto bar where maybe after a certain hour it is adults only and you want to target just the adults only day parts. Doing it with Xibo’s current method would be a mess if you had different hours among different venues. We should also be able to set a loop duration. If you are selling advertising you are either using a loop or share of voice. These methods guarantee the client’s ads plays a certain amount of times. If you sell based on a 2 min loop, there is nothing here to prevent overselling.
The fact that you need to create a playlist or layout before you can create a campaign is extra work for nothing. Coming from the advertising world, a client would send you file(s) with the instructions. We should be able to create a campaign, simply add that file with the rules. If there are multiple files which each need to play, they would rotate each play or follow the scheduling rules depending on the options available. If there are multiple file designated to different displays, using the tags to choose which file plays where would be helpful and you’d be able to create a single campaign while using different files. If the campaign has multiple files that change based on day or time, we should be able to set that in the campaign (like having multiple schedules inside the campaign).