Inside a Digital Signage Software Company

I had a response to my previous post from staff at Adobe.  They seem to be aware of the performance issues I was complaining about but there doesn't seem to be any urgency in adressing it.  Taking advantage of ardware acceleration is coming but it will be for "Full Screen" only, meaning it is not going to really help Digital Signage applications.  It will not work where the Flash component is hosted within another application as it would be for Digital Signage Software.  Digitial Signage must represent a tiny fraction of what Flash is used for but it is disapointing nonetheless to hear the long understood problems of flash performance will remain.  This can only increase anticipation of what SilverLight will do (and let's hope they don't repeat the same mistakes)

Wanted to lay out a few of the major changes currently under development.  Some will be out in the next release (within the coming fortnight) and some will be later, forming the release of 2.0. 

1: Persistant, animated, translucent watermarking (Version 1.5)

This feature will allow an animated, semi-transparent watermark to be placed anywhere on screen.  Uniquely, it will work across all media types; Live Video/TV, Video, Images, Flash, Sliverlight, and web content.

2: NodeServer (1.5)

This is an add-on feature to CampaignManager that will allow one player in a group to act as a kind of proxy server.  All meta comms from the players in the node will be direct to the main server.  All 'payload' downloads will be via the nominated node service.  NodeServer will be the first major component to use the .net Framework 2.0 and the new SQL Server engine SQL Server CE or SQL Server Mobile or SQL Server Anywhere (or whatever it gets called next!).  This engine will form the backbone of the 3.0 release.

3. Super Ticker (2.0)

Super Ticker will move from the current GDI technology to DirectX taking full advantage of the graphics acceleration available.  In addition, the new Ticker will support true right to left and animation styles as well as two tickers on screen at the same time and location of the ticker anywhere (not just along the bottom!)

4. Mosaic (2.0)

A much called for feature (though rarely used in practice) is to be able to go beyond the three zones currently acheivable and to be able to split the screen into however many zones you like. 

As always, comments are welcome.

A quick post to introduce our new blog.  This blog will remain the general source of musings and news on Ryarc.  Ben Mooney's marketing blog will focus on the marketing side of things.  Watch out for our dev blog launching soon!

Anyone who's spent any time working on Digital Signage will know two things about the Flash format.  1: it's perfect for digital signage and 2: It sucks. Don't get me wrong; Flash is a great medium for what it was desgined for (small animated graphics) but it has some serious drawbacks. 

Abysmal Performance...

First and foremost of these is the actual technical architecture of the Flash display engine.  Flash works great in a small window but scale it up to full screen and the performance can be utterly abysmal.  A flash file with large bitmaps and some groovy fading effects etc will bring the most powerful machines to it's knees.  CPU usage for flash increases exponentially when you increase the size of the canvas.  It just wasn't designed to go fulll screen.  The most surprising thing is, is that Macromedia/Adobe have had a good many years to think about this problem but have declined in their wisdom to do something about it.  Just how bad is the problem?  Well, a 500mb HD Video playing full screen uses less CPU than a 50kb Flash file playing full screen.  It's not entirely flash's fault, as the processing load for vector graphics falls on the CPU and not the GPU but still... It has been many years...

Instability

Flash also freezes occasionally and carelessly authored content leaks memory.  The problem for Digital Signage is that leaks are really really really bad news.  Because 99.9999% (or there abouts) of flash files live for 30 seconds in a browser page and do nothing else, its understandable why these bugs haven't been front and center for the developers in the Flash team; but they're heartbreakers for Digital Signage.

Programmability

Flash is programmed using ActionScript.  People have written incredible applications with ActionScript but compared to most modern languages, the development tools are poor, the debugging tools poorer, the language is a little underdeveloped and capabilities for interacting with other system components are severely limited.

Enter the light...
Enter SilverLight, Microsoft's new vector graphics based format.  Or as Microsoft succinctly put it, "Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web."   We aren't 100% certain that the guys in Redmond have nailed these flash problems with SilverLight but we're going to find out soon because...

Ryarc CampaignManager will support SliverLight for Advertising Animation and Kiosk Interactivity

What's really cool about SilverLight is that interactivity and programmability can be done in .net meaning a nice smooth interoperability with existing applications and a much larger talent pool available for the development of interactive content.  Anyway, we'll blog more on this exciting new technology and we expect to offer a version of CampaignManager Digital Signage Software which supports SilverLight in the coming months....

Example of SilverLight in action...