A Deep Dive Into the Sudden Proliferation of LED Signage Walls, Part 3

A Deep Dive Into the Sudden Proliferation of LED Signage Walls, Part 3

 

By Dan Smith
Head of Business Development
LG Business Solutions USA

Rapidly progressing technology in LED signage video walls is helping to eliminate barriers to entry while enhancing the inherent strengths of the technology. Previously we covered how historic obstacles like cost, ordering complexity, visual performance and user experience are being changed through design innovations. Today we’ll conclude with scalability, applications, and durability.

SCALABILITY AND APPLICATIONS – Thanks to its modular form factor and variable mounts and power supplies, LED Signage is rapidly evolving into an “any place, any time” display technology, fitting in stadiums, city parks, corporate lobbies, conference rooms, hotels, museums, and more.

LED Signage walls have always been excellent solutions for making large scale images without lines or bezels, and that fact has introduced the promise of widespread LED Signage displays on any surface – and that really means any surface. What’s more, indoor and weatherproof outdoor models can now achieve brightness of 5,000-plus nits, so no location is off limits, even in direct sunlight.

In addition to standard LED Signage walls, there are now specialty and high-visual-performance MicroLED Signage options for commercial cinemas, cruise ships and aggressive outdoor environments. No matter the size, LED Signage displays also come with the benefit of weighing less and using less energy than comparable LCD walls, lowering the on-site infrastructure and power requirements. Installing LED Signage can be easier because individual LED Signage panels are designed to be pieced together into large seamless LED Signage displays, and some of the latest products have even introduced a tongue and groove rack-and-stack assembly method that eliminates the need to connect any cables between modules.

The robust and reliable nature of LED Signage displays also make them ideal for more unique applications, such as a house of worship that uses the displays for regular services and also wants to relocate them for special events. For instance, churches could use two ceiling-flown LED Signage displays flanking the stage, and then be able to lower and combine them into a single display to form the backdrop of a play. This eliminates the need to rent displays for periodic events and can quickly pay for itself in rental savings.

The advent of notebook-sized LED Signage panels that seamlessly snap together has also introduced the option for unique and creative display solutions, such as a display in the shape of a star or a logo. Early adopters have already used this technology to install single displays that cover an entire lobby wall from floor to ceiling, with imagery flowing around doorways and windows, and even on curved walls thanks to flexible technologies. For content creators and marketing professionals, the possibilities are endless as they are no longer bound to symmetrical shapes and 16:9 displays.

DURABILITY – With quiet 24/7 operation, much lower energy usage and heat generation, long product life of up to 100,000 hours (11.4 years at 100 percent white) and up to 200,000 hours (22.8 years) under real-world usage, LED Signage is the undisputed durability king of the display world. Those are only the core benefits, too, with more specialized enhancements including the ability to be in various outdoor scenarios.

With the rate of technological innovation catching up to the pace of client needs, all signs point to a future where LED Signage displays, including Mini-LED and MicroLED solutions, will dominate the global digital display marketplace.

Holiday Greetings From LG Business Solutions

Holiday Greetings From LG Business Solutions

 

This year has brought more than its share of challenges, trials and tribulations for most people and many businesses. Yet the holidays bring a fine time to reflect on 2020 and how we all worked together to get through it.

We extend heartfelt gratitude to our technology partners, resellers, system integrators and end users for your continuing support. May you and yours thrive in a bounty of health, safety and happiness during the holiday season and into 2021.

Flexibility Is Key for AV Solutions in the Age of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has accelerated change in organizations around the world. IT teams have seen an increase in the amount of data from IoT and an increase in the number of applications and devices connected across their networks. Video use has seen rapid and significant increases on networks globally, and not just consumer video. Video has also become the medium of communication in the business world. Corporate networks are rapidly being expanded to handle the increase in video-based corporate communication.

With the digital transformation in business alongside the transformations that have been going on in the consumer space, user expectations have changed. For example, constant mobile connectivity to business applications is a requirement creating new security and traffic concerns for IT teams, new application development for vendors. This is just one example in a long list.

The COVID-19 crisis has driven still more changes to the way people work, the way consumers and businesses interact. It’s an understatement and not a cliché to say that change is the new normal and in a state of such continual and dramatic changes, organizations looking to deploy digital displays and video applications need to ensure their investments will last. They require assurances they’re purchasing a solution with the flexibility to handle the potential changes ahead, and the ability to adapt as corporate, industry and consumer expectations and requirements shift.

When considering AV applications, one of the key decision points for companies today is whether to adopt a hardware-centric approach or a software-based solution. While it’s true that many solutions have a mix of hardware and software, the key considerations are as follows:

  • Is the hardware proprietary or specialized in any way or is it commercially available and off the shelf?
  • Could the hardware be a limiting factor for scalability or for adding new features?

Answering yes to either of these questions suggests a hardware-centric solution, one that creates a greater business reliance on hardware.

A software-centric solution is one that both:

  • Can be deployed on a variety of hardware allowing the customer to upgrade to new hardware while keeping the software solution and its features.

     and

  • Allows continual updates and allows new features that are developed to be added to the solution.

This last point is the key one: in an age of rapid change and ongoing digital transformation, it’s important to choose a solution that allows customers the flexibility to adopt new features as they become available. Software-centric solutions offer maximum flexibility and in a time of rapid change are a customer’s most reliable choice for a future-proof solution.

To ensure customers have an option for deploying video walls, digital signs and displays of all kind using a software-centric approach, Userful and LG offer a combined solution that runs either on a cloud server or an on-premise server (with freedom of choice for the customer including options from Dell, HP and Lenovo). Userful software has four new releases a year ensuring customers always have access to the most up-to-date features.

By eliminating dependence on specialized hardware and focusing development on a strictly software product that connects directly to LG webOS displays, Userful gives customers peace of mind: a scalable, future-proof solution ready for whatever changes may lie ahead.

To make it easy for LG customers to get started with Userful’s Visual Networking Platform, Userful is offering free 1 year subscriptions to Userful Standard with purchases of select LG webOS displays, until December 31, 2020. 

To learn more about Userful and this special offer, visit userful.com/lg

New LG UV Disinfecting Robot to Help Businesses Deliver Peace of Mind

New LG UV Disinfecting Robot to Help Businesses Deliver Peace of Mind

 

A higher level of disinfection is going to become the new customer expectation in the new contactless economy where we now all live, work, learn and play. Accordingly, LG is developing an autonomous robot that is expected to enable a new standard of hygiene by using ultraviolet (UV-C)* light to disinfect high-touch, high-traffic areas. LG Business Solutions USA plans to offer the UV robot to U.S. hospitality, education, corporate, retail, restaurant and transportation customers in early 2021. The robot will help hotel guests, students in classrooms or patrons of restaurants and other businesses reduce their exposure to harmful bacteria and germs.

The UV Robot is engineered to be easy to operate, and can be integrated into established cleaning routines without requiring expensive staff training or specialists to operate it. Because of its autonomous design, the robot will be able to move easily around tables, chairs and other furniture, generally irradiating a room’s touchable surfaces.

Staff will be able to monitor progress via remote updates to smartphones or tablets. Employee exposure to UV rays will be limited through a built-in safety lock activated by human motion detection sensors, pressing of an emergency stop button or via the mobile application.

Combining LG’s core competencies in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles with a deep understanding of customer needs, the UV robot is a new member of LG’s CLOi family of robots. It is the first in a series of LG CLOi autonomous robots planned for introduction in the United States during 2021, and will be officially unveiled at Digital CES® 2021.

*UV-C covers wavelength spectrum between 100 and 280nm. Actual disinfecting time will be based on room size. Motion detection sensors are effective up to a 16-foot radius. 

Total Cost of Ownership in AV: How Userful and LG Are Leading the Way

The Growing Visual Communications Market

Most displays in the enterprise have traditionally been associated with desktops and workstations. However with growing demand to visually communicate and collaborate, use of large format displays and LED walls has increased across the enterprise. As companies scale their visual communication strategies the need for a cost-effective solution to manage all displays becomes critical. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the best way to judge long-term costs as it includes both deployment and operating costs.

Most companies now run their core business applications in the cloud on a software as a service (SaaS) model that is optimized to take full advantage of on-demand CPU, bandwidth and storage tailored to the needs of the business. This has resulted in an optimized predictable cost model which delivers a lower TCO to IT departments.

Until recently, AV has been an outlier to this model with deployments often driven by proprietary AV hardware for single purpose video walls, digital signage, operational signage, mission-critical or executive dashboards or NOC/SOC video walls. Deployments of this kind live in an isolated pool, often lacking basic network features allowing for integration to the enterprise IT infrastructure. This approach has never been optimized for management by IT departments but rather by costly certified engineers of a particular solution. The IT department becomes wholly dependent on the vendor for any changes required as business requirements change. Simply put, AV hasn’t kept pace with the needs and operations of IT, resulting in costly legacy siloed AV pools across the enterprise, and a high TCO not sustainable as digital transformation initiatives continue to increase.

LG and Userful Lead the Evolution

LG and Userful offer a combined platform solution to solve this problem. Together we have introduced the first in industry managed solution leveraging Userful’s Visual Network Platform software and LG’s award-winning SOC displays embedded with LG webOS.

The result is a platform for AV applications that enables IT departments to run and manage all their displays and applications over the network. Unified communication has been widely adopted, built on the benefits and rapid technological advancements on switching and routing infrastructures. Support for Quality of Service, in the form of traffic classification, queueing or scheduling and bandwidth provisioning are now well understood, easy and cost-effective to implement. Visual content is just another source of traffic that is transported across the network with the appropriate quality of service. As a result of Userful and LG’s combined solution, enterprise IT departments can now deploy and manage AV deployments in a standards-based network service in line with best practices of IT.

The combined LG webOS and Userful solution reduces TCO in eight key ways:
1) Userful with LG webOS displays requires less hardware than visual display solutions of similar class (in fact sometimes no hardware at all), lowering initial CAPEX.
2) When hardware is required with Userful, it’s always commercially available and off the shelf. There are no black boxes, no specialized or proprietary AV devices.
3) Less hardware reduces the need for installation of additional power outlets, simplifying the installation process and reducing the need for system-wide electrical upgrades.
4) Less hardware also means less electricity used.
5) Most customers can simply use their existing network, saving the hefty costs related to network upgrades.
6) With flexible setup and training options, Userful also reduces deployment costs – getting you up and running quickly.
7) Userful reduces long-term costs for an enterprise by reducing the number of vendors needed to manage the various AV silos across the enterprise. Userful is a platform and can be used for any visual display application across the enterprise.
8) The Userful platform serves multiple use cases. For example, adding an executive dashboard to an existing NOC/SOC deployment or digital signage can be accomplished with the same Userful software. Scale limitlessly by adding servers and licenses, not new vendors with more products to learn.

As the number of visual display applications across the enterprise mushrooms, this final point is one of the most important. Organizations can no longer afford to evaluate, deploy, learn and train their teams on multiple point solutions for every display application required. A single platform which can be used for everything from a video wall in a control room to digital signs for customer or employee engagement, offers a compelling long-term reduction in total cost of ownership.

To make it easy for LG customers to get started with Userful’s Visual Networking Platform, Userful is offering free 1 year subscriptions to Userful Standard with purchases of select LG webOS displays, until December 31, 2020. 

To learn more about Userful and this special offer, visit userful.com/lg

Bring 11 Feet of LED Inspiration to Your Next Presentation

Bring 11 Feet of LED Inspiration to Your Next Presentation

 

LG has expanded its All-in-One LED display category with the addition of a new 136-inch model (LAEB015) that is easy to install and portable when integrated with an optional mobile stand. The display delivers high-quality images with Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) resolution, a 1.56mm pixel pitch and a 3,000:1 contrast ratio. It operates at 800 nits of brightness so it can be used in spaces with ambient light, and is viewable up to 160 degrees off-axis both horizontally and vertically, making it ideal for communicating with viewers spaced throughout a room.

The LG LED All-in-One 136-inch display comes ready to assemble in a professional, wheeled flight case, making for uncomplicated delivery and installation in a conference room, classroom, lobby or other location.

Assembly is straightforward. The display itself comprises two mounting cabinets with an embedded controller. After these are secured together, the installer attaches 72 individual LED modules. Having the modules attached to just two cabinet mounts helps minimize variation within the display – the user sees a large, bezel-free, uniform display for presenting, collaborating, communicating information and much more.

The All-in-One 136-inch can be wall-mounted in landscape orientation, which provides a slim form factor and is ADA compliant. The landscape wall mount and tools for installation are included in the display’s flight case.

For mobility, a motorized stand on wheels is available as an option. With it, the LED display can be placed where it is needed and re-placed as desired. The optional stand offers motorized height adjustment for an optimal viewing experience.

Once assembled and installed, simply plug in the display’s power cable, turn on the screen with a remote control, and you’re ready to add massive impact to your content. No additional controller connections or module configuration is required. And should the display ever need servicing, modules are easily detachable from the front of the display using a provided mounting tool, and replaced quickly without cabling.

The LG LED All-in-One 136-inch display comes with three HDMI inputs, audio out and a variety of input ports on the side of the display.

Direct View LED display technology has improved significantly over the past several years to the point where they can now be used cost effectively in enterprise settings as a bright, immersive alternative to other display technologies like projectors or flat-panel video walls. This new LED All-in-One 136-inch display is a great solution to help elevate your presentations to an impressive new level.

Learn more about the LG LED All-in-One 136-inch display LAEB015 here.

Ensuring You Are Ready AV in an IT World

The worlds of AV and IT are converging. More and more IT departments are taking responsibility for the strategic planning, deployment and management of audio and visual applications. The industry is also seeing a growing trend of products for AV applications relying on the network for their delivery.

This has created disruption in the AV world and occasional confusion amongst AV pros who have had to learn about IP networks, bandwidth, network security and more. At the same time it has given IT departments a learning curve as they enter the world of codecs, video resolution, compression related issues and more.

While many in the AV world have been discussing the various potential standards to be employed for AV-over-IP, the reality is that the important architecture has already been implemented by the enterprise using the IP standards that govern network traffic. All AV delivered using the network must work within the well-established IP networking infrastructure. For both system integrators and for operation leaders in enterprise organizations this means that if you’re going to deploy an AV application over the network, your IT team needs to be part of the conversation.

LG and Userful offer a combined solution for delivery of AV applications using an IT-familiar architecture: software, the network, standard commercially available off-the-shelf hardware and (optionally) servers in the cloud. By offering a solution with corporate IT standards in mind, Userful and LG make it virtually seamless for IT teams to deploy AV applications and easy for AV pros to integrate their applications onto departmental networks.

Userful is a software solution that is run either on a local server, inside the LAN, or from a server in the cloud. The server connects over the network to LG webOS displays, each of which runs the Userful uClient app. This eliminates the need for a PC or media player behind each screen. It also addresses key security concerns by minimizing hardware on site and eliminating proprietary or black box hardware. When run on premise, customers can use hardware from a variety of approved vendors such as Lenovo, HP and Dell and the Userful software appliance. Built on CentOS it allows IT departments to run all their standards security measures on the server.

With this IT-compliant infrastructure, Userful and LG support a wide variety of applications from video walls for operation centers and control rooms, to displays for digital signage and corporate communication, from data dashboards to customer demo walls. As long as content can be sent down or streamed via network, Userful and LG enable administrators to display any content source anywhere on any display at any time and in real time. The solution enables video walls of virtually unlimited size and resolution.

To make it easy for LG customers to get started with Userful’s Visual Networking Platform, Userful is offering free 1 year subscriptions to Userful Standard with purchases of select LG webOS displays, until December 31, 2020. 

To learn more about Userful and this special offer, visit userful.com/lg

Announcing the LG DigiTour for Business – an Incredible Virtual Experience in Immersive 3D

Announcing the LG DigiTour for Business – an Incredible Virtual Experience in Immersive 3D

 

There’s no plane to catch. No waiting in lines. And best of all, this show is open whenever you want. It’s the new LG DigiTour – an immersive 3D virtual platform with realistic environments and cutting-edge technology to explore. Here you can discover and interact with the latest LG commercial displays and IT solutions, instantly pull up features and specs, connect with LG reps and much more. It’s a great place to spend some time and reimagine what’s possible for your business, or your client’s business.

Powered by Unreal Engine, an advanced real-time 3D creation tool, the LG DigiTour encourages visitors to discover LG Business Solutions products while “walking” through virtual commercial showrooms including Corporate, Education, Control Room and Innovation, with more to come.

The LG DigiTour will also host live chats where you can inquire about the products and speak with an LG representative in real time to address questions. In addition to the interactive online showrooms, LG will be hosting webinars, educational seminars and other events where industry leaders can interact and communicate during the pandemic and beyond.

The cancellation of in-person events this year challenged LG Business Solutions to find new innovative ways to connect with customers. And now, the LG DigiTour will likely be a permanent staple, as it’s a powerfully effective means to reach audiences remotely, even audiences that may not have been at a physical tradeshow. LG DigiTour is a future-proof way to ensure that we can serve our customers remotely, now and in the years to come.

With its always-on access, and desktop, mobile and tablet compatibility, you don’t need to leave home to reimagine the future of LG commercial displays and IT solutions. Enter the LG DigiTour now.

Revolutionizing AV-over-IP with Userful and LG webOS: A Standards and Software Based Approach to AV

AV-over-IP is a hot topic these days and AV pros and IT departments around the world are embracing it as the solution to drive display applications of all kinds – from digital signage to corporate meeting rooms, from operation center video walls to immersive video experiences. Despite the increasing demand for AV-over-IP, there has been no one unifying protocol or even one unifying technological approach. AV-over-IP quite literally means the transmission of audio-visual information via data packets over an Internet Protocol, or put more simply, using the network rather than using traditional audio-visual signal transmission.

That definition of AV-over-IP is generic enough that it fits a lot of different applications and differentiating among them is the first step in choosing the right approach for any particular topic.

To differentiate among AV-over-IP offerings it’s important to understand how AV-over-IP came about. Traditional AV solutions used circuit-switched networks and that involved various proprietary cables and connectors and resulted in a cumbersome solution that was often proprietary and offered limited scalability.

As the use of networks rose and more video was deployed over the network some AV companies began to replace their AV connectors with specialized encoders and decoders to allow AV signals to be sent over an IP network.

We’ll call this conventional AV-over-IP: it’s using the network but isn’t using the server, switch and computer infrastructure that most people associate with IP networks. Instead it’s using proprietary or specialized hardware and codecs that aren’t interoperable and have no universally agreed upon standards. In essence the encoder and decoder infrastructure that so many AV-over-IP solutions promote is still reliant on cumbersome proprietary and specialized hardware.

In contrast to this is a Software based approach to AV-over-IP that relies only on commercially available off-the-shelf hardware, rejecting the use of encoders and decoders and fully embracing existing IP standards. This approach relies exclusively on a tech stack that would be familiar to any IT department and is standard in the enterprise.

Userful software runs either on an on-premise Server (standard commercially available off-the-shelf hardware from HP, Lenovo, Dell, etc.) or a cloud server that then connects through a standard IP network directly to LG webOS smart displays compatible with Userful’s uClient app. Those smart displays all run Userful’s uClient app which allows them to sync across displays for video walls and allows them to connect back to the Userful server (either in the cloud or on-premise).

The result is an AV-over-IP platform that allows customers to stream any content source to any display in any location, at any time and in real time. Customers can deploy content of unlimited resolution onto video walls of unlimited size, using a cloud based server for public display and digital signage applications. Using an on-premise server, customers can deploy real-time content and interact with it in real time for a control room or operation center video wall. The combined Userful and LG webOS solution offers a visual networking platform that takes an AV-over-IP approach and allows IT teams to easily stream content anytime and anywhere for customer engagement, employee communication, process automation, rapid decision-making and more.

Userful with LG WebOS compared with traditional AV-over-IP solutions:

Revolutionizing AV-over-IP with Userful and LG webOS: A Standards and Software Based Approach to AV

To make it easy for LG customers to get started with Userful’s Visual Networking Platform, Userful is offering free 1 year subscriptions to Userful Standard with purchases of select LG webOS displays, until December 31, 2020. 

To learn more about Userful and this special offer, visit userful.com/lg