At the beginning there was darkness and Chaos and iOS ruled the world… Google had to put up a fight and fast. So they did. They acquired a small start up called Android Inc. and released its first smart phone open source operating system at 2007, 15 years ago!. Since 2010 Android is the most common portable devices operating system.
When I came to Gil, NoviSign’s CEO, and offered him to establish a company to develop an open, cloud based Digital Signage solution, at 2009, he said no, there is no standardization, the players are too complicated to implement, too expensive – low margins.
At 2010 the first Android based streaming/video/signage players appeared in the market. At the beginning of 2011 Gil came to me this time and said – now it is the time! The new Android based players are going to re-standardize the signage industry, reduce the cost and change the Digital Signage market! So we did – we established NoviSign and were one of the first companies to offer Android based Digital Signage on cloud platform. It was not that smooth… The Operating System at its first versions was shaky and far from flawless. The code (we started with Adobe air on top of Android JellyBean 4.2) must have been super-efficient in order to overcome the slowness and instability of the Android based Devices.
Later on, due to security and performance consideration, NoviSign Re-developed the Android based player as native player app, which its recent releases are fully operational supported on production, in tens of thousands of customers sites across the globe, 5 continents and 80 countries. NoviSign is very proud that we identified the Android as a potential leader in this market, that we managed together with the ongoing improvements by Google, to overcome the “childhood diseases” reached operational excellence and provided high value to our Digital Signage customers.
NoviSign App released on June 1, 2013 and which is till today being maintained and installed with 10,000’s of installations from all over the world rated 4.6 with Google Play market store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.novisign.android.player
At NoviSign offices and in our website one can see the Android Signage evolution. Hopefully one day it will become the first Android Digital Signage Museum.
Thank you Google!
Avi.