The article, edited by Bill Yackey, follows:

LAS VEGAS — The buzzphrase of the first day of Digital Signage Expo seemed to be “small-to-medium businesses,” or customers that have only a small number of screens or deployments. There has always been a segment of the digital signage industry focused on this long-tail market, but the economy has no doubt lead even the big players in the digital signage industry to reconsider their target customers.

That was highly evident when Scala issued a press release this morning, announcing six new initiatives to “lower the barrier to entry to digital signage.” Most notable of the six is a partnership with FASTSIGNS, a traditional signage provider that announced in January that it is offering a packaged digital signage solution using NEC hardware and Scala software. FASTSIGNS CEO Catherine Monson said that in the six weeks since the product announcement, the company has received $2 million in quotes for the system.

Scala’s other initiatives consists of:

• A partnership with Frame Media to launch SignChannel, a new low-cost, self-service, easy to use, entry-level digital signage service based on wireless photo frame technology.

• Scala as a Service, a hosted version of Scala Content Manager that provides an online digital signage network for a monthly fee.

• The “Ultra Low Cost PC” (ULCPC), at approximately half the cost of traditional PCs.

• Support for several all-in-one devices that include a “PC built into the Screen” form factor.

• An initiative to support cost-effective video appliances (aka “MPEG Players”) reducing the total cost of ownership of both the hardware and software per Player.

Although NEC Display Solutions was highlighting its impressive 82-inch LCD and its ultra-thin bezel MultiSync X461UN for video walls, Mike Zmuda, director of business development, made a point to emphasize the release of NEC’s MultiSync 15 Series and the 46-inch LCD4615, designed for entry-level digital signage applications.

“You have to give up the thin bezel for the 15-series, and there is less firmware, but the 15-series easily allows the addition of touch overlays and protective panels at a cheap price,” Zmuda said.

In the sense that time is money, Omnivex’s next release of its Moxie software (due March 1) is engineered to save users time scheduling content using a system similar to iTunes’ Genius, where songs are given attributes and tags and play when those attributes are selected. Here digital signage content is given meta-tags and assigned to play based on the user selecting relevant tags.

Black Box Network Services has had the SMB customer in its mind all along, offering a complete digital signage solution and emphasizing its 24/7 tech support specific to digital signage. Although the company has more than 180,000 SKUs in its catalog, it showed the iCompel, a player designed for small deployments which comes with software already installed in the player. Brian Kutchma, director of marketing, also said that although the software is licensed, customers aren’t charged for future upgrades.

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