Development of a Digital Signage System for Automatic Collection and Distribution of Its Content from the Existing Digital Contents and Its Field Trials

Digital signage, which is becoming more and more common, has the advantage of being able to display more contents dynamically, according to the time-of-day, the location and the environment where it is installed. However, the cost and amount of work required to produce these contents are becoming a significant barrier. Particularly in local regions such as towns and shopping areas, small-scale local businesses or regional governments may have their own materials for advertising. But the cost of additional processing is required to make full use of the newly introduced digital signage. In this paper, we propose a method to resolve these issues, which establishes a distribution model for such local content, links local content to digital signage, and distributes it. The proposal uses a "one-source, multi-use" approach, automatically taking local content in a database and registering it in a digital signage database, and then displaying it on the digital signage, making use of the special characteristics of the signage. The authors have designed and developed a prototype based on this proposal and applied it to a streetcar digital signage field trials.