Open Forum

NIcole,

Thank you for starting this thread, it has elicited an eye-opening series of posts. For everyone else I want to share the bottom tier solution. The Bright Sign program is based on the former Roku playback system. It may be low-end but extremely functional system. The hardware is less than 2K and the authoring software is free. It is easy to find a dealer in your area.

The Isabella Steward Gardner museum is a very nice example. I spoke to the IT person there and they described is as a system they set up themselves, an intranet running from a didactic server using web-based software. That may not be a completely accurate description but apparently they did not use a third party program.


Regards,

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Edward Malouf
Principal
Content Design Collaborative LLC
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We use BrightSign Players in our museum.  I've created Digital Signage and also Interactive Kiosks with the BrightSign units.  They support HTML5 now so that helps also.  I started using them when they first came out almost 10 years ago.  They are solid state, meaning they have no moving parts to go bad, and last a long time.  In 10 years that I've been using them I've only had 3 go bad out of 25-30 and these are the original units.  I'd highly recommend them.

Thanks,

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Alan Byler
Media Specialist
State Museum of Pennsylvania
Harrisburg PA
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Have 1 PC running 20 monitors above our ticketing counter.  We looked at Roku boxes,and other signage solutions, and other devices.  We actually run our signage from a website we created. The signage website is ran and update-able from our Content Management System.  
Simple solution, but runs like a champ.  Since it is a website, we can run video, slideshows and dynamic content.  Just a chromeless web browser full screen mode.  And all that needs to happen is a simple F5 if we need any major updates to the UI.  
We make various AJAX calls to a service with Javascript (again being a simple website this works great), to pull ticket availability for next entrance time for exhibitions.

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Carlos Mosqueda
UI/UX Designer and Developer
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Denver CO
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