During a period of unprecedented change in so many parts of the AV business, it seems entirely logical that the 2025 edition of the Digital Signage Summit (DSS) – being held on Wednesday, February 5 at ISE 2025 in room CC4.1 – will take a deep-dive into several of the trends and technologies currently ‘disrupting’ the digital signage industry.
From ePaper to new advances in LED, the summit will “look at how digital signage is being impacted by all these new technologies, as well as what it means for integrators and vendors in terms of changing their offerings and business models to address the changing needs”, says Florian Rotberg, managing director of invidis consulting and co-curator and host of DSS alongside his invidis consulting colleague Stefan Schieker.
In keeping with the anticipated artificial intelligence theme present at many ISE summits and meetings this year, AI will be a key topic at DSS. A session entitled ‘Prompting Signage – How AI is disrupting digital signage’ will feature speakers including Tina Tse, co-founder & advisor, Pantheon Lab and Craig Francis, digital signage partner manager, Google ChromeOS, discussing the opportunities and influence of AI on digital signage.
Then, in ‘The Next Frontier – digital humans and generative AI in retail digital signage’, speakers including Pantheon Lab co-founder and CEO Ivan Lau will explore real-world examples of AI-powered virtual shopping assistants, personalised product recommendations, and interactive brand ambassadors.
“We’re already seeing how generative AI is changing the industry in terms of creating and translating new content and being able to localise it with different information and artwork,” says Rotberg. “But what’s also interesting is how AI is allowing integrators and customers to really analyse the data they get through the systems, as well as enabling the hardware.”
Cyber concerns
Cybersecurity is also prominent in the DSS programme, acknowledging its steep rise in importance as approaches to system design and connectivity have shifted. “Ten years ago, digital signage was a siloed installation and wasn’t usually connected to any backend systems, so security wasn’t a big issue,” says Rotberg. “But today that has completely changed and digital signage, like other systems, is fully connected to everything in the backend, meaning that all relevant data is more or less connected to the digital signage. It means that digital signage now has the same security requirement as an enterprise resource planning system, so the software and integration have to be fully certified and you have to make sure there are no security issues.”
Discussing this subject in ‘Navigating Cyber-Security Risks in Digital Signage’ will be speakers including Jeff Hastings, CTO of BrightSign, and Jason Cremins, founder and CEO of Signagelive.
Sustainability is also set to be a recurring topic of this year’s event, with Visionect sales & marketing project manager Magdalena Bogatinovska among the speakers in a session on ePaper (EPD) – the energy-saving, high contrast technology that is widely expected to have a transformative effect on the area of the market requiring non-video content.
Noting that an EPD system can typically run on the same battery for two years, Rotberg predicts that “ePaper will be a game-changer. Currently it’s only available in sizes up to 40in, but in the next few years that will likely go up to 70in or 80in. Also, prices are still very high, but we expect those to come down fast, so there’s a lot of potential.”
With Rotberg and Schieker set to outline the latest data about the industry in their introductory session, ‘Managing Signage: Breaking the rules of digital signage’, the scene is set for another edition of an event that traditionally draws one of the largest summit audiences at ISE.
“One of the great things about DSS is that it’s very compact, at under four hours, and it gives people a very useful update about all the latest trends affecting our business – and at the start of the year, too. I think those are some of the key reasons behind its continued popularity,” concludes Rotberg.
Digital Signage Summit will run on Wednesday, February 5, from 10:30-14:10 in room CC4.1.
