Digital signage systems and services

(Discontinued on 18 January 2021, see TSB Circular 295​​)​​

Motivation
Digital signage (DS) systems and services have aroused public interest due to various kinds of effective presentation and the feature of the user interaction in advertisement, which is different from the traditional unidirectional advertisement.

It is possible to provide optimal contents containing personalized advertisements which target individual audiences through interactions between the audiences' terminal devices (embedded with wireless communication interface including short range communications such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC) and a digital signage system. Digital signage terminal devices may possess sensing devices such as camera, thermometer, touch panel, and microphone for providing intuitive user experiences. Due to their point-to-multipoint architecture and their potential for contextual adaptation, DS systems are also ideally suited to provide information to the public in the event of emergencies.

However, most of digital signage systems and services are proprietary, and therefore systems, contents and applications across different networks or vendors are not interoperable. Due to this circumstance, it is impossible to realize one-source multiple-use approach for a single content. This also will cause problems in building and expanding large-scale digital signage networks. Thus, it is important to support interoperability amongst different service providers and vendors. Globally interoperable standards will activate a market for the digital signage systems and services.

The current digital signage services treat multimedia contents consisting of text, video, graphics and audio. Emerging technologies may impact on the digital signage services. The digital signage industry needs standards for covering a wide variety of digital signage use cases.

This Question will cover all relevant work items on digital signage systems and services.

Study items
Study items to be considered include, but are not limited to:

• definition and scope of digital signage systems and services;
• domain of digital signage services (e.g. location owners);
• use cases and requirements for digital signage systems and services;
• architectural aspects of digital signage systems to support requirements and various use cases;
• digital signage terminal profiles for supporting various kinds of digital signage applications;
• provision of digital signage content from content providers to digital signage service providers;
• multimedia application frameworks for digital signage;
  NOTE – HTML5 and relevant standards need to be considered for the multimedia application frameworks for digital signage.
• linkage between digital signage systems and other systems and applications;
• usage of cloud computing technologies for efficient deployment and operation, for effective service offering, and for combining with other services;
• presentation aspects of digital signage services such as combination of multiple displays and/or terminals;
• specifications on metadata and media format of digital signage content for the purpose of one-source, multiple-use approach and for fitting with the use cases;
• sets of interactions and their methods between audience's devices and digital signage systems to accommodate audience participated interactive digital signage services;
• specifications of communications and multimedia technologies supporting promotion/advertisement in the digital signage services;
• how to acquire and deliver supplementary data (e.g. audience measurement data) for the purpose of providing context-aware digital signage services (e.g. information is automatically changed along with communications between DS systems and/or audience's devices);
• considerations on providing privacy protection to prevent the side-effects on gathering anonymous information (i.e., personal information, etc.) in public spaces;
• management and operational aspects of digital signage systems;
• consideration on providing emergency information including warning messages in the disaster environment;
• consideration on providing notification in the private/public places;
• consideration on providing accessibility for persons with disabilities and specific needs (including foreign visitors);
• review and analysis of existing Recommendations and relevant specifications to find any reusable materials for digital signage systems and services;
• considerations on how to help measure and mitigate climate change.

Tasks
Tasks include, but are not limited to:

• identification of the use cases and requirements;
• definition of functional architectures and its components to support use cases and requirements for digital signage systems and services;
• definition of digital signage terminal profiles based on capabilities;
• definition of mechanisms and protocols to provide content delivery functions;
• definition of a framework and mechanisms for audience measurement in digital signage services;
• definition of interface specifications amongst functional components of digital signage systems;
• definition of requirements and service interfaces of digital signage services using cloud computing technologies;
• definition of procedures and methods to interact between digital signage systems and audience's devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs;
• definition of multimedia application frameworks, metadata and media formats for digital signage services;
• definition of control functions for synchronous/asynchronous presentation of multiple displays and terminals;
• definition of a framework and procedures to provide services having public characteristics, including emergency warning and notification over digital signage systems;
• definition of a security framework for digital signage services to provide service authentication and authorization;
• modification and/or extension of existing Recommendations under ITU‑T Study Group 16 responsibility to enable interoperable digital signage systems;
• collaboration and harmonization with other standardization bodies, forums and consortia to develop Recommendations to support digital signage services.

An up-to-date status of work under this Question is found in the SG16 work programme
(http://itu.int/ITU-T/workprog/wp_search.aspx?sp=16&q=14/16).

Relationships

Recommendations

• F, G, H, I, Q, T, V, X, Y-series Recommendations under the responsibility of SG16

Questions

• All Questions of Study Group 16

Study groups

• ITU‑T SGs 2, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 20
• ITU‑R SGs 4, 5 and 6
• ITU-D SG2

Other bodies

• ISO, IEC, ISO/IEC, ETSI
• W3C, IETF, IEEE, OASIS
• Digital Signage Consortium (Japan)