What digital signage costs
The three separate costs in any digital signage project - hardware, platform licensing and content management - and what actually drives each of them.
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Digital Signage and Privacy: What You Can and Cannot Do
Screen technology can now do things that are legal, technically impressive and a genuinely bad idea. This is where we draw our lines, and why.
Audience measurement, and where it goes wrong
There is a category of product that uses a camera to estimate the age and gender of everyone who looks at a screen. We do not deploy it. It processes images of people who never agreed to it, the accuracy claims are generous, and if it becomes public that your business was scanning customers' faces, the story is not going to include the word "anonymised".
What is reasonable is aggregate counting that does not identify anyone, and honest environment data: this screen is here, this many people pass it, this is the typical dwell time. That is enough to plan and to sell against, and you can explain it to a customer without discomfort.
Practical rules we work to
- No personal information on a public screen — queue calls by number, not by name
- No facial recognition or demographic estimation from camera images, on any network
- Any counting is aggregate, retains no images, and is disclosed if anyone asks
- Signage players hold no customer data, and sit on a network segment agreed with your IT team
- Interactive units clear the session after inactivity, so nobody sees what the last person entered
- If a use is lawful but we think it would embarrass you, we will say so before building it
Questions people actually ask
Is audience measurement legal in New Zealand?
Aggregate counting that does not identify anyone is generally straightforward. Anything involving images of identifiable people engages the Privacy Act and needs real thought about purpose, notification and retention. We are not your legal advisers and will say so, but we will not build something we think puts you in that position without flagging it clearly first.
Can screens show customer names?
For a collection point where someone has opted in, sometimes, with a first name or an order number. For a clinic or a branch, no. The safe default is a number or a partial identifier, which achieves the same operational outcome without displaying who is attending what.
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Tell us about the space. We will tell you what belongs in it.
A first conversation costs you nothing and usually takes twenty minutes. Bring a photo of the wall and a rough idea of what you want it to do.
- A written specification you can price against anyone
- The platform we would run, named before you sign
- Hardware and content costed separately, so you can see both
- No obligation, and no pressure to buy screens you do not need