Announcing Exclaim Digital Signage
March 20, 2017
Today, Meiosis is proud to announce our newest product: Exclaim Digital Signage. Until now, creating or installing digital signage has been a hardware and software nightmare. With Exclaim, we've attempted to solve this problem by building a digital signage solution that you could manage from a phone and power with off-the-shelf hardware.
We started by looking at our own office - An assortment of unused TVs and monitors of various sizes, and even a few tablets. We started looking into our options - Various providers needing expensive hardware, custom software, specialized apps. All of the solutions would let us a get a few of the screens working, but not all of them. So we built our own.
We started by laying out what we wanted and landed on three key requirements:
- We want to be able to manage them all from any computer or phone via a web browser.
- It needs to run on all of our devices.
- We want to be able to synchronize the screens, or have them play different playlists whenever we choose.
With that, we set off to work and built out a prototype. We ended up ensuring that our software needed nothing more than a web browser to run. But we still had one problem: The TVs would need something to power their input. And ideally, something cheap that we could buy at our local big-box retailer. So what did we find? Google Chromecasts. At $35 each, they were cost effective and easy to install.
Our development team developed and deployed a Chromecast app so that we could start a casting session and then disconnect the source computer, ensuring that we didn't need to leave the source computer running after starting the app.
We've been using Exclaim Digital Signage internally for a few months now and are happy to finally share it with the world!
