IBTE Digital Signage

Digital Signage Short Course

IBTE CET is currently developing a short course where IBTE ITS will share some of the skills and knowledge that we’ve gained. We will share the techniques to create multi screen digital signages using techniques from our 1st generation signages.

This course will be run only if there is interest and is approved. It is planned to cost BND300 for citizens and BND450 for non citizens.

If you are interested follow the link above and fill the form with your contact details. Your contact details will only be used to contact you if the short course is available.

Short Course Interest Form

Digital Signage Services

If you are interested with our current generation IBTEDS solutions (renting or purchasing), you can contact IBTE ITS by using the email provided below. Take note that we are a government education institution and we may not be able to entertain all requests.

it.support@ibte.edu.bn

IBTE Digital Signage History

1st Generation

  • First completed digital signage wall setup during 100 years of education exhibition
  • Consumer off-the-shelf TVs with USB thumb drives was used
  • We were given a 2x3 grid of TV and was given the task to create a compelling showcase with it
  • After experimenting we found that we can play media files on thumb drives on the TV and that we can control all the TVs using one Remote, we concluded that if we could create videos with exact timing we can create an effect of one cohesive display
  • We also found that Keynote (Apple’s PowerPoint Alternative/Presentation software) was suitable to create these videos.
  • Although effective and cheap, the creation of the media was labour intensive (as it needed one Keynote file per display)
  • Rendering it is also time consuming. (10 minutes per display with up to 20 displays per exhibition)

2nd Generation

  • We began experimenting with using one whole video and slicing it up for the separate displays. At first we were using Keynote to prepare it
  • In 2016, after a lot of development work we successfully developed a dynamic video preprocessor in-house that is able to take a video and generate the required media
  • What used to take 10 minutes per display now we can render the required media in 5 minutes for all the displays
  • At that time the most time consuming part of the setup is uploading the media into the USB drives and syncing the display using a remote control
  • This setup requires the models of the TV to be similar as the load time must almost match. Because we were using multiple sizes, and makes it was difficult to achieve a perfect sync.
  • We were reaching the limits of what we could do with this setup.

Current Generation

  • To solve the bottlenecks we needed a way to upload the media wirelessly, and we also needed to be able to control the playback of all the devices.
  • In 2016, IBTE ITS purchased Raspberry Pi 3, a wifi enabled ARM computer to see if it would be suitable.
  • We created a custom striped down raspbian image that is easy to setup and install with a seamless video player, an image overlay a server program that accepts commands via the network
  • We also wrote an IBTEDS content management system with node.js and incorporated the IBTEDS video pre-processor.
  • This has cut down the time of updating the media from 20 minutes to less than 5 minutes.
  • The technology is very flexible and robust able to easily used for launches and adapted to any display.
  • We hypothesise the technology can support hundreds of connected digital signage limited only by network
  • This IBTEDS solution does not currently have a distributor or vendor outside of IBTE