Digital Signage: Fixing a Broken Industry

March 12, 2026 · 11 min read

tl;dr;

The digital signage industry is a “zombie” that survives only because customers don’t know any better. They do poor marketing, drowning in self-praise and hollow buzzwords that miss the target audience entirely. Communication channels overflow with relentless hardware spam and shallow product pitches, creating an industry-wide transparency problem. The paradoxical irony? An industry selling communication tools that can’t communicate worth a damn.

Honestly, I love digital signage. It’s a brilliant mashup of technologies with genuine potential to revolutionize marketing and communication.

Unfortunately, the industry sabotages itself through opacity, zero collaboration, and a stubborn refusal to adopt common standards.

This article captures my observations after 15+ years programming digital signage solutions and running SmilControl.

The Information Desert

Want proof the industry has problems? Try finding serious, independent information about digital signage technology. What software actually exists, who the real players are, or an honest feature comparison.

Beyond Wikipedia, you’ll find almost nothing independent.

What floods the internet instead? Company-produced content designed to give you just enough information to spotlight their products while keeping you in the dark about alternatives.

Marketing your products is fine and every business does it. But clumsy, value-free content marketing that treats every product as a magical solution to everything? That’s just lazy.

Company Marketing: Where Strategy Goes to Die

Look at the marketing strategies of most digital signage companies and you’ll quickly realize: there isn’t one.

Instead of genuine communication that addresses actual customer pain points, the industry drowns in self-congratulation and buzzword bingo. Blogs stuffed with stock photos and hollow statements that say absolutely nothing. The situation has improved slightly in recent years, but AI threatens to make it exponentially worse.

While researching for industry articles, I’ve lost count of how many times I clicked on a promising headline only to find vapid self-promotion. Companies declaring themselves heroes for installing screens in a small-town supermarket and calling it a “flagship store.”

Everyone claims to be a market leader. Everyone has “decades of experience” and manages “thousands of screens”. Empty superlatives no one can verify and that sound increasingly ridiculous in the 21st century.

Real expertise shows itself through work, through actual case studies, through substance and not through self-declared titles on a website or social media profile.

The Content Marketing Illusion

Everyone talks about content marketing. Almost no one does it right.

Instead of practical advice, how-tos, or genuine insights, the industry churns out thinly-veiled product advertisements masquerading as articles. Search for “digital signage best practices” and you’ll find endless variations of “Why Our Solution Is Amazing.”

Anyone genuinely trying to learn about digital signage implementation, technology comparisons, or strategic deployment hits a wall of self-promotion. Helpful resources? Rare. Corporate puff pieces? Everywhere.

Social Media: Still Missing the Point even Now

The industry still hasn’t grasped what social networks are actually for. Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll find hardware ads, press release links, and trade show photos of guys pointing at each other, grinning about how brilliant and successful they all are.

Side note: Pointing at each other in trade show photos is the male equivalent of duck face. Just saying.

In all my years on LinkedIn, I’ve encountered exactly one person – a Swiss-Italian colleague – who attempted genuine long-term content marketing. His topics got repetitive and his reach declined (LinkedIn increasingly resembles Facebook for professionals), but at least he understood the assignment.

Years ago, I regularly posted educational digital signage content on LinkedIn and Facebook. I can count on one hand how many times competitors liked or commented. When I engage with well-written articles from colleagues (there are many smart people in this industry), I rarely get responses. The prevailing strategy: post and ghost.

Here’s the kicker: My business partner, who’s well-known in the German signage industry, told me people privately praised my articles. When he asked why they didn’t engage publicly, the answer was always the same: “He’s a competitor!”

How the hell do you sell communication solutions credibly when you’re terrified of acknowledging a competitor’s work?

The Press Dilemma

Industry magazines, trade press, and blogs present another massive problem. Instead of delivering neutral, informative content, too many prioritize relationships and advertising revenue over editorial independence. The result? A flood of generic articles that read like corporate newsletters which are stuffed with empty phrases that put readers to sleep.

Critical reporting? Genuine insights? Nowhere to be found. Potential customers don’t get informed; they get fed promotional fluff and the self-aggrandizing narratives of self-proclaimed industry giants.

Want examples? In April 2025, a Reddit user launched a comprehensive, curated list of digital signage companies at https://signagelist.org. Free to access. Building and maintaining something like that requires serious work and passion.

The echo from our industry press after more than half a year? Crickets. They could have supported it, collaborated with the creators to build a neutral comparison platform that actually helps customers make informed decisions.

So, they miss the chance to work together with creators to build a neutral comparing platform to help customers.

But why bother with that when you can run another breathless piece about Netflix running DooH spots somewhere or Samsung converting a Coca-Cola sign into a display at a New York sports stadium?

Both are real articles from December 2025, both completely irrelevant to anyone trying to understand the industry.

A Fistful of Dollars

In my early years writing articles and developing open source digital signage software I reached out to industry press trying to place guest articles or gain some coverage.

Most never responded.

I would have understood rejection with feedback – “too technical,” “not our focus,” whatever. That’s how you learn and improve. We’re in the same damn industry. Why not help each other grow?

Instead, near-total silence.

DigitalSignageToday was an exception: they forwarded my inquiry to a sales agency, who contacted me offering to write a “professional article” for a fee, with placement not guaranteed. I have the correspondence.

The only person who showed genuine interest was Dave Heyes from Sixteen-to-nine, who invited me for a podcast about SMIL. After he retired, that publication lost what made it different.

The Press Release That Went Nowhere

During Covid19 lockdowns in 2020, I built an Open Source Android Launcher for maintaining digital signage media players without rooting the underlying Android OS.

That is a significant security improvement since rooting autonomous media players is genuinely risky. I wrote extensive documentation, sent out press releases to all major industry publishers.

Zero interest.

Some months later, I stumbled across this article about a company offering a similar solution for Windows. Good for them getting that coverage.

My open source press release got ignored. Theirs got featured. I never learned why.

Sure, similar dynamics exist in many industries.

Software Comparison Platforms

Software comparison platforms like Capterra? Getting listed is straightforward – even if you don’t want to be. But prominent placement requires payment.

In 2018, Capterra offered me vouchers to distribute to customers in exchange for reviews on their platform. Is this “independent” comparison?

The Result?

Hardly anyone outside the industry understands what digital signage actually is. When people ask what I do for a living and I say “I develop and license digital signage software,” I’m met with blank stares.

Yet everyone knows what SEO means. Everyone Googles. Everyone understands tweeting (or whatever we’re calling it this week).

Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

This zombie industry shambles forward not through innovation or excellence, but because customers don’t know any better. It feeds on information asymmetry and confusion.

Now let’s talk about another infuriating category in this industry.

Spammy Hardware Vendors

My inboxes overflow with relentless spam from hardware manufacturers which are predominantly Chinese suppliers who mistake “customer contact” for “flooding you with offers.” That’s why I’ve stopped accepting connection requests from the endless parade of “Bettys,” “Amandas,” and “Nicoles” on LinkedIn.

There’s zero actual communication. The moment you accept a connection, the PDF bombardment begins: “Hello dear…” followed by product catalogs you never asked for.

It’s frustrating because I have deep respect for Chinese culture and innovation and success they had the last 30 years. I grew up with a Chinese friend who was one of the smartest, most honest people I’ve known. But in digital signage, certain manufacturers have turned spam into an art form, and it’s damaging everyone’s reputation.

To any of these sellers reading this: I maintain a list of every company that sends unsolicited spam. I will never buy from them. Ever.

This behavior creates a double problem: it clogs communication channels with irrelevant noise while simultaneously devaluing the entire industry’s professionalism.

Lack of Standards = Vendor Lock-in by Design

Purchasing a digital signage solution, especially cloud SaaS, means walking straight into a vendor lock-in trap. Media players and content management systems must come from the same vendor. You cannot run a Samsung MagicInfo player with Scala CMS, or mix and match any other combinations.

Why? Companies deliberately obscure their protocols and formats to make interoperability impossible.

Switching costs are brutal – expensive, time-consuming, often prohibitive. The moment you sign that contract, you’re locked in.

Real Innovation (Yes, It Exists)

Companies endlessly talk about “vision” and “innovation.” But the only genuine innovation I’ve seen in digital signage came around 2010 from Taiwanese company IAdea.

They built ready-to-deploy digital signage players based on SMIL. This is a W3C-supported open standard (the same organization behind HTML).

SMIL is purpose-built for synchronizing and triggering media in playlists, which maps perfectly to digital signage requirements. IAdea published free documentation and actively encouraged other companies to adopt SMIL to make the industry more open and affordable.

With a SMIL-compatible CMS, connecting to IAdea players was seamless. You could switch vendors as easily as switching from Firefox to Chrome to Safari. In a project-based industry drowning in proprietary formats, this was revolutionary.

The industry’s response? Most companies ignored SMIL entirely or adopted it half-heartedly for “budget” offerings. They refused to cannibalize their proprietary “enterprise” cash cows.

SMIL is why I started my business. SmilControl’s first product was an enterprise-grade SMIL-compatible SaaS proving that open standards and professional solutions aren’t mutually exclusive.

In 2016, I began developing a platform-independent SMIL media player as open source. Why? Because companies kept trying to build cheap SMIL players using interns and students instead of investing in IAdea’s well-supported hardware.

Most of them failed spectacularly.

So I built the garlic-player as a foundation they could use to assemble their own hardware solutions properly.

Communication with Other Companies: The Ghosting Olympics

IAdea maintains a public list of partners selling SMIL-compatible products. Out of curiosity, I contacted more than 25 companies on that list. Not pitching sales, not offering services; just asking for technical information about their SMIL implementations.

Response rate: Three companies. Out of twenty-five.

Two replied with not invented here and Xibo. Also an open source project promised to discuss SMIL compatibility internally and get back to me. That was around 2017. Still waiting. lol

Some years later I reached out to SignageOS CEO about potential cooperation. I had a native open source media player, they had a JavaScript-based one. Both support SMIL and are OSS. Seemed like a natural fit to share experiences, maybe integrate each other’s work.

He forwarded me to their CTO. I wrote twice.

Ghosted.

The pattern was clear: this industry doesn’t collaborate, it hoards. So I stopped wasting time seeking partnerships and built what I needed myself for my customers: A complete open source software ecosystem for my customers. You’ll find it on GitHub and GarlicSignage

Fighting Windmills

Advocating for open source and open standards in this industry sometimes feels like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. But here’s the truth: the industry doesn’t ignore OSS and SMIL because they’re inadequate – they ignore them because their success would destroy the business model.

Vendor lock-in isn’t a bug. It’s the feature.

This zombie survives by keeping customers trapped. Transparency threatens profit margins built on customer ignorance. Open standards would empower customers to switch vendors freely, compare solutions objectively, and make informed decisions. That’s precisely what many companies don’t want.

So they keep the information scarce, the formats proprietary, and the customers trapped.

Why I Still Believe

After everything I’ve written here, you might wonder why I’m still in digital signage after 15+ years.

Simple: The technology is brilliant. The potential is massive. And yes, good solutions exist. I refuse to let this industry stay a zombie

I started my company SmilControl because I saw what open standards like SMIL could do. No vendor lock-in. Real interoperability. Transparent technology. That’s not idealism. It’s just good engineering.

But here’s the thing: I’m not the only one trying to do this right. There are other companies, competitors, who are building solid, honest solutions. The problem is we all get drowned out by the noise and suffer from bad marketing, spam etc.

So this article isn’t about promoting my business. It’s about raising the industry’s standards so the good solutions: mine, yours, anyone’s can be found and judged on merit, not marketing budget.

Digital signage deserves better. And I’m still naive enough to believe we can get there.