Toshiba President & CEO Scott Maccabe (with scissors) cuts the ribbon at LA Interactive at LA’s Staples Center with the help of the L.A. King’s Ice Girls.
I’m fresh back from Toshiba’s 2014 LEAD End User Conference in Dallas along with a ribbon cutting at the Staples Center in Los Angeles where Toshiba unveiled LA Interactive powered by Toshiba (see the press release in the news section). LA Interactive is a special section in the Staples Center which features Toshiba technology, including a 6-by-13 foot LED video wall, an 8-by-5 foot Toshiba Ultra HD video wall, two 46-inch Toshiba Virtuoso interactive touch displays featuring team and event-specific information, a 60-inch Toshiba “Touch & Get” interactive kiosk, which enables high-speed transfers of exclusive Los Angeles Kings and STAPLES Center content, and three 65-inch Toshiba Ultra HD displays. That’s a lot of display technology!
This is quite a coupe for the company and reportedly Toshiba will be announcing another big digital display win in the not-too-distant future. You may be asking yourself what do digital displays have to do with the office imaging channel? Depending on your perspective, nothing and everything.
As the office imaging industry continues its transition from hardware to solutions and services, digital displays represent another product and services segment that dealers can leverage to fill the gap resulting from declining sales of output devices and the subsequent decline in printed output. It’s only going to get worse. Considering what companies such as Toshiba, Sharp, and Samsung are investing in this product segment validates the importance of expanding beyond traditional print devices. In some ways, these OEMs are reinventing themselves, in other ways they’re making themselves more relevant in a digital world.
When one of my press colleagues asked Bill Melo, Toshiba’s chief marketing executive, if Toshiba is a copier company or a digital signage company, he responded that you could have asked Toshiba the same thing when it got into MPS. Are you an MPS company or a copier company? Today, one wouldn’t ask that question because there is no difference and he expects it will be the same thing with digital signage over time.
We may still be a few years away from erasing that distinction, but it’s not a bad idea for those in the channel to resign themselves, and I mean that in a positive way, to taking on digital signage. When you look at the top verticals in this area, sports marketing, education, retail, and medical there are numerous opportunities for the average dealer and even greater opportunities for the not so average dealer.
Digital signage may still be considered a novelty within the channel today, but in a few short years there’s a better than even chance that it will become much more than a niche offering. A few OEMs are betting on it.
Thanks for reading.
