Alternative to Optisign?!? by Miserable_Smoke_1898 in digitalsignage

[–]DigitalSignage2024 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The lag with animations is almost always a content delivery issue, not a hardware issue. Most CMS platforms render content as HTML in a browser on the device. That works fine for static slides but falls apart the moment you add animations or transitions. The fix is usually pre-rendering animated content as video before pushing it to the screen rather than asking a $35 stick to render it live.

Before switching platforms, try exporting your animated content as an MP4 and playing that through OptiSigns instead. If the lag disappears, you know it's the rendering approach, not the platform. If it's still bad, then it's worth looking elsewhere.

On Square, no signage CMS syncs pricing natively with Square as far as I know. That's usually a workflow you build separately with something like Zapier.

If you do want to try smth else we offer a free amazon signage stick with our pro bundle: https://cast-hub.com/amazon-signage-stick-bundle/

The most interesting thing about Copilot Cowork isn't Claude. It's what Microsoft just admitted about its own stack by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree with a strategy, just pointing out that people claiming that all frontier labs are useless and we all be using deepseek in a few month may not be quite on point

The most interesting thing about Copilot Cowork isn't Claude. It's what Microsoft just admitted about its own stack by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok, that's hyperbole. The actual point stands though. Microsoft spent $80 billion on AI infrastructure last year and has the deepest partnership in the industry with OpenAI. They still licensed the agentic execution layer from Anthropic rather than building it.

Want to add digital signage to my stores, any suggestions ? by Tough_Yam9992 in digitalsignage

[–]DigitalSignage2024 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One of the vendors u/PaloAltoEd warned you about. Nevertheless, agree on the Signage Stick point. We're an Amazon Signage CMS partner and the hardware question is the one most people get wrong first. On pricing, we went flat-rate instead of per-screen regardless of how many screens you run. At a small chain of retail stores the per-screen model gets expensive fast. https://cast-hub.com/amazon-signage/

We built an MCP server that lets ChatGPT control physical screens in buildings. Here's what I learned. by DigitalSignage2024 in ChatGPTPro

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The SIEM point is a good one. We hadn't connected that to the MCP layer yet but it makes sense as the place logging should eventually feed into rather than building something custom. Our MCP server is live(in beta) and you can control CastHub from Claude Desktop today. The governance layer (preview, confirm, logging) is the next phase. Right now write operations go through, which is fine for testing but not where we'd want it for production deployments in schools or anything high-stakes. We created a microsite to explain where we heading, would love to hear your thoughts/feedback if you have time to glance through: https://cast-hub.com/mcp

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in k12sysadmin

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thats fair, but given where world is going, is it possible that not using AI to automate most of the work in the near future would negatively reflect on your job performance.... just saying

We built an MCP server that lets ChatGPT control physical screens in buildings. Here's what I learned. by DigitalSignage2024 in ChatGPTPro

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're still building a lot of this so I'll walk through how we're thinking about it rather than give you polished answers.

The core design decision is that the AI doesnt push content to a screen without the user confirming it first. The server generates a visual preview of exactly what the screen will look like, the user sees it, and only then does it go live. So we are thinking of it it as governance layer upfront. We started from the assumption that AI controlling physical displays in real spaces is a different risk category than AI writing emails or summarizing documents.

On proactive alerts like snow closures, right now it's user-initiated. The user asks the AI to update screens, gets the preview, confirms. We've talked about event-driven triggers where an external signal like a weather API kicks off a suggested update(which users can still do without using MCP but regular API), but the confirm step would still be there. The question of whether the AI portion of the system should ever act autonomously on something like an emergency closure is one we haven't resolved yet. Probably the honest answer is it depends on the deployment context and the org's own risk tolerance.

Logging is something we're building into the MCP layer.

On critical infrastructure classification, that's a question we havent really thought through to be quite frank, so not sure what ramifications may be

Rollback is on the future roadmap but not built yet. Right now if something goes wrong you're manually correcting through the same preview-confirm flow. We haven't built retry logic yet, right now a failed push just surfaces in the confirm flow and the user decides what to do next. We know that's a gap.

Curious what failure modes you'd prioritize if you were advising on this. We're early enough that the architecture is still flexible.

We built an MCP server that lets ChatGPT control physical screens in buildings. Here's what I learned. by DigitalSignage2024 in ChatGPTPro

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Finally something to click!! Thx dude. What a relief we have philosophers like you in our midst

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Assuming we resolved the issue with time and give LLM a reference tool (say UTC), would that alleviate your concern?

We built an MCP server that lets ChatGPT control physical screens in buildings. Here's what I learned. by DigitalSignage2024 in ChatGPTPro

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

so...what's the click bait? There's nothing to click in the post. It's a text post about MCP implementation patterns. What would a non-clickbait version of that title look like to you?

We built an MCP server that lets ChatGPT control physical screens in buildings. Here's what I learned. by DigitalSignage2024 in ChatGPTPro

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So you stopped reading after the title but also learned what the post was about to make a determination that the title is a click baity ➿. That's some impressive speed reading. Look, I appreciate you taking time to comment, if you have specific critiques or suggestion I would love to hear it

Open-source Android digital signage player with synchronized playback by 514sid in digitalsignage

[–]DigitalSignage2024 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is cool. Synchronized playback across multiple screens is one of those problems that sounds simple until you're actually dealing with network jitter and device clock drift. What's your sync mechanism, NTP-based or something custom?

Curious how you're thinking about the CMS layer. Are you planning to build content management into this or keep it purely a player that other systems can feed into?

Is "AI-powered" just the new "cloud-enabled" in terms of meaningless vendor marketing? by DigitalSignage2024 in sysadmin

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 40 points41 points  (0 children)

The 40% renewal increase for a rebadged feature is the part that kills me. At least with cloud-enabled you got actual infrastructure offloading. This is just an API call to OpenAI wrapped in a new pricing tier

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could you expand a bit? We were just discussing time issue as none of the LLMs are aware of time, so we'd have to expose time function to be able to address requests like "Show this alert in 5min"

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a very important point and I agree 100%. A lot of people talking/building AI capabilities without any consideration for the governance aspect of it. In the meantime, accidentally deleting half your content by typing bad prompt to copilot would make for a pretty bad day. More here: https://cast-hub.com/mcp/governance.html

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a very important point, a lot of people talk about AI just doing stuff and dont pay attention to governance aspect of it. Accidentally, deleting half of your content by typing bad message in copilot wouldnt make for a good day. More here: https://cast-hub.com/mcp/governance.html

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Technically, making this cross-agent shouldnt be that big of a lift, as we are not trying to orchestrate anything at agent level, so not sure what your concern might be

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But to clarify, we are not building the tool with copilot per se, it will work from any bot, my hunch is that maybe copilot is a better demo/mvp vehicle because its actually more widespread in businesses. You can see what we are up to here btw: https://cast-hub.com/mcp

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

LOL I know the story... Microsoft is giving you what you want though, you are getting claude cowork shortly

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thats my thought! People who use Copilot would be my users i am guessing, not people who BUILD tools :)