Competition Research

[sumnerevans]

I found a competitor to Visplay. It's pretty good, but I think our solution is better from an architectural standpoint as well as a philosophical standpoint (all OSS).

Screenly

• https://www.screenly.io/ose/ (open source edition)

piSignage

• https://github.com/colloqi/piSignage (closed source client)
• https://github.com/colloqi/pisignage-server (open source server)

Features

• Web UI for managing assets, playlists, displays, etc.
  • It seems like piSignage has this as the only interface, which means that it's not very scriptable, and it would be difficult to integrate with a club website, for example.
  • One advantage that we have is that you don't need to add a display to the server, you just have to subscribe a TV to the server's feed.
• TV groups
  • piSignage allows you to group TVs together so you can have different playlists on each.
  • We can implement this by having multiple sources files to subscribe to. For example, we might have bb136.sources.yaml and ct105.sources.yaml and then when configuring TVs in said places, we would point them to that config. The difficulty here is needing physical access to the TVs to change their group.
  • If we care about changing the TV's group dynamically, then we can keep track of the TVs IP/MAC/whatever on the server and then return a different list of sources according to a table lookup on the server.
• Screen Layouts
  • In piSignage, from what I can tell, there are ~15 predefined layouts. Custom layout upload is allowed as well.
  • We can create predefined layouts as well.
  • Having these layouts as first class will allow us to pass layouts as sources, which is cool (it also allows nesting!).
• Playlist scheduling
  • piSignage allows you to schedule playlist start times
  • I think we can implement this client side or server side or both
• TV on/off control
  • Visplay message protocol anyone?
• Content display in 6 zones
  • piSignage only allows content to be shown in 6 zones
  • Visplay will allow you to display content in virtually infinite zones
• "Works offline, downloads content incrementally with auto-restart and uses websocket for real-time server communication."
  • piSignage is designed to have most assets uploaded to the server and then cached on the Pi. Remote assets are a thing in piSignage, but not the main use case.
  • Visplay is already being designed for this. In fact, the caching ability of Visplay is better, since we allow caching at all levels of the source tree.
• TV synchronization
  • I think we can handle this using the Visplay Server Message protocol
• REST API
  • The server has an API.
  • We can do this on our server, too. If users don't like the server, they can write their own though!

Advantages we Have

• No JavaScript. piSignage is written in NodeJS. We will not use that garbage.
• Sources tree, no dependence on a single server!
• All Open Source, including client.
• Heavily extensible, anyone can implement a server which serves config files.
• PROTOCOL BASED!!! We are defining a protocol, and then creating reference implementations. If someone wants to create a new server or even client implementation, they are more than welcome to.