And so we picked SMIL, an open web standard developed by the W3C (the fellows that brought us HTML, CSS and all the other things that make the internet work) for our new light-weight digital signage player which, thanks to Microsoft Silverlight, runs on a variety of platforms such as Windows, OS X, Linux, Symbian and Windows CE.
As some of you may remember, we released SMIL support for our Oxygen media platform a few months ago. Since then a lot has happened! Our partner IAdea has rolled out a few hundred units of their XDS-100 players that are managed by our platform. Furthermore we are working with many partners and customers to roll out more SMIL-based digital signage installations.
We see great future for SMIL in the Digital Signage industry, because it makes it easier to deploy and run digital signage networks and therefore we decided to invest further by releasing an Open Source Oxygen SMIL Player. We not only choose Silverlight as development platform because of the multiplatform capabilities, but because of being able to run it on ordinary browsers. That opens up a completely new channel for our Oxygen customers: internet users!
Our customers can now extend their digital signage program to their websites using the same infrastructure. This will enable them to engage viewers as individuals, seamlessly across multiple touchpoints.
Matthias