Screenly - Digital Signage for Cinemas

Every digital signage environment comes with it own set of challenges. Deploying digital signage in a movie theater is no exception. Done right however, it can add a lot of value to both you and your visitors.

Over the years, we’ve helped enable a lot of cinemas with their digital signage deployments and we’d love to help you too.

What is digital signage used for in cinemas?

There are a lot of ways digital signage can be used in this environment. When we speak to our customers, some of the most common use cases include:

Displaying full HD trailers
Display show times
Display concession menus

There are of course other uses case beyond these, but those are some of the most common use cases.

Unique challenges

As already mentioned, every deployment provides it own set of challenges. Here are some of the common challenges and solutions that we have encountered while working with cinemas and movie theaters world-wide.

Bandwidth

Since it’s common to run through a large number of full HD video trailers, bandwidth can become a big problem if you have a large number of screens but limited internet connection.. Fortunately with Screenly, this is issue is largely mitigated by the fact that we cache content locally. As such, each player only needs to fetch the video file ones, and then it is cached locally and played directly from the player’s local storage.

Security

While this is not necessarily a unique challenge to cinemas, it is a challenge nonetheless. Digital signage and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming more and more common targets for hackers. Moreover, many vendors still don’t take security serious. For us, security has been a serious focus from day one. We follow industry best practice both on the player and on our cloud infrastructure.

Rapid changes

Often the content needs to change quickly. Perhaps you ran out of an item you were promoting, or perhaps you want to promote an item last minute. With Screenly you can quickly make a change in our CMS and moments later the change will be live on all your screens.

Budget

Last, but not least, is the budget. For many cinemas, the budget for digital signage is slim. Fortunately, Screenly is both powerful and cost effective. Our player (based on the famous Raspberry Pi) cost a fraction of what our competitors charge for their player. Moreover, our CMS is also far more affordable than most things on the market. These things combined means that you can make some serious cost savings.

Get the case study

This is a real world use case of Screenly running at Cinergy

We’ve developed a case study together with Ubuntu on the Screenly deployment at Cinergy, a one stop entertainment centres with multiple locations in Texas. You can get the case study here.