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).
Great to hear you are up and running and thank you for taking the time to post your comments on your experiences so far
With regards to Operating Hours this is achieved as you have mentioned by creating Dayparts and then assigning them to Display Setting Profiles making it easy to assign operating hours to multiple Displays. Assigned profiles can be overridden per Displays as needed by using the Profile Settings tab. I am unsure as to how we could make that process any less work for a User? Once the Daypart is created it is easy to select when needed for multiple displays that share those same operating hours. You are always going to have to set multiple operating hours for differing venues and I am unsure as to how that could be simplified? If you do have any suggestions then please do let me know.
To answer your other points have you looked at our Ad Campaign functionality? So we have two types of Campaign, a Layout List which is a Campaign made up of Layouts which is then Scheduled to Displays and Ad Campaigns for specifically creating advertising campaigns were you set the criteria, such as Target Type, Budget, Impressions etc so that the scheduling is handled automatically for you. You do need to create a Layout to which you add your content to be shown as we do not have functionality to add media files directly to Ad Campaigns.
We do of course take into consideration requests from our users who have helped shape features and functionality over the years. If you do find you have ideas that would be beneficial for other users, then please do create a new topic in our Feature Requests category to start a discussion
Xibo has only recently added DOOH specific functionality, so we’re always glad to have feedback.
I think this could be improved so that you didn’t have to create a layout, and could just pick from the media library when creating the Ad Campaign (@natasha similar do how we can do media scheduling since v4).
Regarding opening hours, we definitely could do more to support blanking/turning off the screen when outside of opening hours - currently you have to schedule to relevant commands manually - and those are device dependent.
I am also new to Xibo, already made my first post regarding… but of all the Open Source projects I work with, very few actually have actual staff offering this level of detail support to self-hosters. Many projects, the self-hosters are left to help each other.
This post has already boosted my confidence that Xibo is a project we want to be actively involved in.
