Bizplay | On display

We bring all the goodies of the internet to TV screens in virtually any business.

[bizplay]

Top 15 sites to download beautiful free images from

It’s always a challenge to find the perfect image to accompany your designs. We all know that powerful images can make a huge difference in getting your message across. Trying to find great images can be incredibly time-consuming, let alone if you like to find free ones. So we decided to come to the rescue by compiling a list of 15 sites that allow to to download great images (photos and illustrations) for free to make your Bizplay channel (or whatever medium you like to use them on) look even more amazing.

Unsplash

They have thousands of images, in various themes and all under CC0 license, they cleverly changed into “Unsplash License”. You can browse pre-defined featured or curated collections, explore images in Unsplash categories, or search for a specific topic image in the search bar. If you’re looking for food- or office pictures, they have it all! Before downloading your favorite picture, you can see technical info and how often it was viewed and downloaded. Most of the pictures have an ‘Instagram feel’ for a contemporary look.

Gratisography

Gratisography is a project started by Ryan McGuire; “I’m an avid photographer that enjoys capturing slightly eclectic images. I created Gratisography so anyone can download high-resolution copies of my photos for free, and use them on personal and commercial projects”. There is an option to download in bundles at a cost of $5 per bundle. If you’re looking for out of the ordinary, whimsical, pictures you’re at the right place. The pictures will enhance your message and attract attention for sure!

Life Of Pix

Don’t be daunted by the homepage, the gallery has a nice clean look with themes. Next to the listed themes, it shows the number of pictures for that theme. Some themes have hundreds of pictures, where other themes have limited pictures. Good thing is that there are weekly new uploads. They also have the possibility to search by photographer so you can find your favorite photographer and see if he has won the award “Photographer of the week”. They have an option for free videos where you get directed the website with the name (unsurprisingly): Life of vids. Most pictures are edited with Photoshop, or like programs. It makes the pictures look with an ‘Instagram feel’, just as before mentioned Unsplash.

Pexels

It’s a joy to browse through Pexel’s catalog of great photos. All of them are available under the CC0 license. Many of them can be conveniently used as fullscreen background photos. Be sure to check out the “Browse photos by color” option to quickly find a picture that perfectly matches your color scheme. 

Pixabay

With a claim to have over 1.3 million images, the homepage looks a bit overwhelming. Not only they have pictures, but illustrations, videos and vector images as well. Our tip is to click the “More” button. You’ll be directed to the page where you can filter your search for the perfect picture. You can filter on: orientation, category (20 categories), size in pixels and even color to match the mood of your page. As one of the few free stock photo sites, Pixabay has an app you can download from both the Playstore and App store.

Jay Mantri

These pictures are mostly nature-, urban pictures and an occasional food picture. The site doesn’t offer loads of pictures and fresh uploads have lacking been some time. The upside is that the pictures are free and can catch various moods.

Stocksnap

Stocksnap is also one of the big players, like Pixabay and Unsplash. On their website is the claim they upload hundreds of photos on a weekly basis. That should give you more choice than you can chew! You can choose pictures from 150 (!) categories or select all pictures and filter on several conditions, like trending, views, downloads, favorites and date. Looking at the trending photos, the vast majority has a mood filter. But there are also a lot of pictures with a clean look.

Death To The Stockphotos

Death to Stock has a complete different approach to distributing stock photos. With most of the websites described before you don’t need an account to download stock photos. With Death to Stock you need to sign up first to get access to stock photos. The free version gives you free sets of images every month alongside occasional stories, giveaways and community emails, according to their website. The other option is a paid premium upgrade, but that’s not free. If you’re considering signing up for an account you have the advantage to rather exclusive photos that don’t show up everywhere.

Pic Jumbo

Like Gratisography, Pic Jumbo is a project from one single photographer. Pic Jumbo is started by a Czech called Victor Hanacek. The site offers 1500+ free pictures, next to a paid account. The pictures are categorized in 16 categories and are in black and white or have a nice mood filter. The young Czech has our sympathy. Read his ‘about page’ to see why.

Kaboom Pics

Kaboom Pics was started by Karolina and has a site with free stock photos divided in 14 categories, mainly used for Lifestyle, Interior design and specialist bloggers.But here comes the best part. If you find the perfect picture, you can choose the download size and find a color palette with six complementary HEX colors. Your page cannot go wrong!

Picography

Picography offers gorgeous free images, all under CC0 license. The images are not categorized, but do have tags to find the matching image to your page. The site has images in the nature, urban, categories, all with a soft filter for a vintage look.

Im Free

Im Free is a bit of an odd ball in the park. The images they offer on their site is part of a website creator. That makes navigation on the site different from other stock photo sites. Once you overcome that you’ll find some 18 categories with sub-categories of images.

New Old Stock

If you’re in need of some old, mostly black and white, images you can give this a try. The images are not sorted in any way, not in categories nor with tags. So, it will take some time to go thru all the images. But it can be worth your while.

Iso Republic

Free stock photos for creative professionals is the claim on their site. Since we are creative professionals working with digital signage, a good match. They have fourteen categories to choose from. And each category has plenty images. In the rare occasion, you can’t find your perfect picture, they have a redirect to Shutterstock.

Dreamstime

A personal favorite is Dreamstime. They have loads of CC0 images, illustrations and vectors. First, you’ll need to specify you’re looking for free photos. After that you’re set to browse in fifteen categories, all containing sub-categories for refining your search. In the search results. The images have a mix of a clean standard look and with a filter to create a mood.

An important word about licensing

It’s important to understand what is meant by the different licensing and copyrights of images. It can be hard to know if you are legally allowed to use or modify an image you find online for your personal or commercial uses, so the Creative Commons Zero license is especially valuable. According to the Creative Commons website, the CC0 license “enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and re-use the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.” In other words, you are free to use that great image you found under the CC0 license for any purpose. Here are the best free stock photo sites we found whose images fall under CC0. Although you are free to use any image under the CC0 license, it’s a kind gesture to add a credit line next to the image.

[bizplay]

Review: Bizplay on a Philips 43BDL4050D Android display

Philips was so nice to supply us with one of their new D-Line Android-based signage displays. We got the 43BDL4050D. Our primary goal was to see how this display plays Bizplay content. So this summary is definitely not an in-depth review of the display, nor does it go into all the capabilities of the display.

So what did we look at when we say "how the display plays Bizplay content"? Well, Bizplay runs completely in a web browser. Content created with Bizplay is dynamic web content which uses HTML(5), CSS(3) and Javascript to play whatever our customers have created in the Bizplay designer. The main challenge for playback devices is to smoothly play any "moving content", like page element animations and (HD) video.

Page element animations

To make signage content visually attractive, it is very common to add some dynamics to the presentation. We do that by offering several dynamic page transitions, but also by offering a selection of page element and text animations. These range from simple sliding effects to 3d tilting effects. Another much used feature is the ability to show content like a news ticker. Such a news ticker is especially hard to get right, since it is a continuous and constant flow of text which makes the slightest hiccup immediately apparent.

Video

Video (and especially HD video) is hard for low-powered devices to get right, since this involves loading and playing big files. If at the same time you animate a playing video in or out the page, then the combination of playing a high resolution video with animation puts a real strain on the player.

Hardware and benchmarks

Before we dive into the test results, let me summarize the raw data. We're looking at an Android player that is a quad core ARM RK30Board, 1.61GHz with a MALI-400MP GPU and 1.82GB RAM. It comes installed with Android 4.4.4.

We ran Antutu and Geekbench 3 to get the raw benchmark scores:

Antutu: 25349 (3D: 1530, UX: 8563, CPU: 12201, RAM: 3055)

Geekbench 3:

Single-core performance: 495

Multi-core performance: 1259

How we tested

There are two ways of playing Bizplay on an Android device:

through a web browser (Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, you name it)

through the Bizplay app from the Play Store

We tested both playback methods with the following two types of content:

A really basic HTML page with continuously moving text using both a high-performant Javascript approach (GSAP) and a native CSS3 approach. Especially the latter should demonstrate the best attainable animation smoothness, since that's what it is made for and web browsers optimize for. This is as plain vanilla as it gets.

A Bizplay demo playlist with gradually increasing complexity. Playing a Bizplay playlist entails a lot more than just playing one or two simple animations, so there is a lot more going on. At best the playlist does not play noticeably worse then the really basic HTML page, but since so much is going on, you can expect to see slightly worse behavior. But this is how the screen is expected to be used in real life, so it is important to see how it holds up.

The test results

Up front appology

Due to lack of time, we did not get very professional footage of the playback tests, so please pardon the terrible picture quality. Nonetheless, it is sufficient to demonstrate the performance characteristics of each test case.

1.1. Web browser with basic HTML animation

This is the raw performance test: a native Android app (Chromium 45, in this case) with the de facto way of doing the most optimal animations in HTML5, using all the tricks to make sure that hardware acceleration is enabled, if available on the device.

What stands out from the video is that neither animation runs smoothly. We've made it so that on every pass, a random speed is chosen to get a mix of different run speeds. But in all speeds, it shows hiccups. The most browser native approach (CSS3) runs noticeably better than the high-performant Javascript (GSAP) animation. We've thrown in a fading in background image (with CSS3) to see if that had any effect. And it does make matters worse when the fade starts.

1.2. Web browser with Bizplay signage content

A lot more is thrown into the mix when Bizplay content is shown. So let's have a look at how well Chromium keeps up.

As you can see, the main struggle begins with the ticker. And the photo animations are also far from smooth. The 3D animations on the other hand are okay. Then another problem arises: the video is not played automatically. This is a typical limitation of Android browsers. Since Android is primarily a mobile platform, automatic video playback is prohibited in a browser by default, to save battery. Some browsers allow you to remove this restriction, but Chromium on this TV didn't. So there's no video playback in the web browser, unfortunately. Finally, in Phase 3, all goes sour when all the animations kick in. But as mentioned in the playlist itself: this is quite an extreme use case.

2.1. Bizplay app with basic HTML animation

Next we installed the Bizplay Android app and ran both types of content. We were not expecting any different performance than in Chromium, since we use the regular Android web view and that is supposedly the same rendering engine as Chromium. But we were in for a surprise.

First of all, the animation runs equally bad in our app as in Chromium. No difference there. However, strangely enough the fonts were rendered a lot larger. It might not be very apparent in this test, but it was so much more apparent in the next.

2.2. Bizplay app with Bizplay signage content

Lastly, we tested the Bizplay content in the Bizplay app.

Here you clearly see the the strange scaling of the web fonts that happened. This must be due to some misconfiguration of our app, since this did not happen in Chromium. Still, this is the first device that we ever saw this phenomenon on, so we need to dive into this. But this bug currently makes this device unusable to play Bizplay content. Also, the intro page for phase 2 mysteriously never shows. On the upside: YouTube video plays automatically. But then again: all but one native HTML5 videos do not. So it is unfortunately a very mixed bag.

Conclusion

We are very grateful that Philips supplied us with this Android-based signage screen. The screen itself is very nice, renders images and text really nicely and as such will work really well with more static content, like menu boards.

But if you want to play more dynamic content in a web-based player like Bizplay, then this display is simply not a great option. Other more native signage player apps that are not web-based might work just fine, but for playing Bizplay content we recommend looking for a different solution. A simple display without a built-in player, but with -for example- an Asus Chromebit connected to it, greatly outperforms this built-in Android player (or any Android player we've tried so far, for that matter). Or you could just connect the Chromebit to this Philips display, bypassing the Android player, but benefiting from the great picture and build quality.

[bizplay]

Add music to your channels 🎶

Ready to rock 'n roll? We have just added a new music app to Bizplay: the Streaming Audio app. This enables you to add your favorite web radio station to your Bizplay channel. 

Put it on a background page

If you weren't using background pages already, then now is probably a good time to start. By adding the Streaming Audio app to a background page, it will keep on playing in the background while your "foreground pages" scroll by. Learn more about background pages by watching our instruction videos. An alternative is to create a page with a Streaming Audio app and to add that as a foreground page to your entire playlist.

Beware of the format beast

Audio streams come in many different formats, not all of which can be played back by every web browser. Be sure to test the stream of your choice on your playback device to determine it actually works. Many popular radio stations have streams available in different formats, so search well for the right web address. MP3 and OGG formats are generally supported best. These sources can help you find the right streams:

http://www.radiosure.com/stations (use the search box!)

http://www.hendrikjansen.nl/henk/streaming.html

Availability

The streaming audio app is available to all subscriptions that support video too (Bizplay Full and Bizplay Pro).

Rock on! 🤘🏻

[bizplay]

The Instagram app has arrived

By popular demand, it has finally arrived: the Instagram app! Are you an avid Instagram user? Then this app is the ideal way to share your photographic creations with your audience through your Bizplay screens.

Go to the Bizplay designer

Drag the Instagram on your page

Add your Instagram account

Save the page and play!

Maximum age

In the wake of the Instagram app we have also equipped all of our "social apps" (Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and Instagram) with the option to set the maximum age of messages to be displayed. This ranges from 10 minutes to 90 days. This will keep your social feeds tasty fresh. ;)

[bizplay]

Finally... the Date app is here!

Finally! We are proud to present: our long overdue Date app!

Out of the box, several well known date formats are supported...

We also added the option to use parts of a date, like the day, month name, year, etc. This allows you to get creative and compose a date format of your own, like this one (which essentially consists of 3 date apps, each showing just a part of a date):

Setting your content language

In preparation for this Date app we have also added an important feature for all non-English customers. You can now set the language of your page content on your company settings page. The language you select here will be used to display the correct day and month names in the Date app as well as the correct format. But also other language-dependent apps have been adapted to use this setting to display the date and time correctly, like the Time app, Weather app, Twitter app, Facebook app, etc. We have even added support for right-to-left languages.

We really hope you enjoy the new features!

The Bizplay Team

[bizplay]

ChromeOS version 40 is out

On January 27th Google released the latest version of their ChromeOS operating system for the Chromebox. This new version brings a few new features related to the new Google "Material Design" of Chrome. More importantly the new version fixes a lot of bugs.

Since the last two versions ChromeOS did not work perfectly and caused us to file several bug reports with the ChromeOS development team we decided to take the new version for a careful test drive.

We are very glad with what we found; all Bizplay apps, content and features run well on the new version (40.0.2214.93) of ChromeOS. Videos, animations and transitions run smooth, fonts and images are crisp. 

We will continue our tests and will have a better insight in the long term functioning after leaving our duration tests to run for a few more days.  

We are happy to to conclude that the Chromebox runs Bizplay content well again. Mainly because the combination of the Chromebox with our free Bizplay kiosk app gives this device the most "bang for the buck". It runs more reliably, smoother and with higher resolution than Android HDMI TV devices and it is cheaper than, but performs nearly as well as, the Intel NUC (that we still advise for video heavy content). Read more on how to use a Chromebox to show your digital signage content here.

Please keep an eye on this blog to keep up to date with future versions of ChromeOS, related hardware and how to best use these for showing your Bizplay digital signage content in your shop, school, venue or business.

[bizplay]

Screens, playback devices and channels

At Bizplay we found that sometimes our customers confuse the concepts of screens, playback devices and channels and how they relate to the actual signage screen that they have in their venue. In this article we'll shed some light on the differences.

Channels

In Bizplay you can create one or more slide shows, that we call playlists. Each playlist contains a sequence of pages. You can make these playlists available for playback on a signage screen, by dragging them into a channel. Think of a "channel" as a TV channel (like CNN) which you can tune your TV into.

Like a TV channel has different shows on during the day, you can also create a schedule of Bizplay playlists to be played during the day and during the week. For example, you might want to show different content during lunch time than during the rest of the day. Or you might want to prepare the playlist with next week's offers to start playing first thing next Monday.

These are the things you can do with a channel (provided that you have a subscription that allows scheduling). The next step is to tune your signage screen into the desired channel.

Screens

The most basic way of tuning into one of your Bizplay channels, is to start a web browser on your signage screen (or on the playback device connected to that) and open the web address that you see written next to the channel on your dashboard. The channel will now start playing.

Counting screen sessions

All Bizplay subscriptions have a limit to the number of screens that you can tune into any one of your channels. Therefore, the system constantly monitors the number of browser sessions that are currently tuned into a channel and if a allowed limit is exceeded for longer than 20 minutes, it will send you a warning that a message will be displayed on the exceeding screens that states that the number of screens are exceeded. You can always see the details of currently active screens (or "screen sessions") by going to your settings and selecting Active screens.

Drawbacks and the need for "playback devices"

There are a couple of drawbacks to setting an explicit web address on a signage screen:

each signage screen needs to be uniquely configured; if you have multiple screens, it is a lot less cumbersome if you would just have one identical configuration for all screens;

if you ever want to change channels, you have to change the setup of your signage screen, which might be a little hard to access, since it generally runs unattended and without any controls like a keyboard;

since screen sessions can be started from any browser, all the "active screens" page will show you is currently active web browsers that are playing back content from your channels. You never have a complete picture of all your signage screens and their status.

To solve the above problems, we added the concept of "playback devices".

Playback devices

Within Bizplay you can register any browser (generally one on a signage screen) as a unique playback device. You can name it and categorize it. But most importantly, you can tune it into a channel directly from your central Bizplay settings dashboard. This way you can register all your signage screens and keep track of them.

So how does this work? Instead of setting the browser on your signage screen to go to the web address of a specific channel, you now just use one web address: http://play.playr.biz . The first time the browser goes to this address, you will get a unique registration code with which you can register the playback device on your settings dashboard.

After that you select the channel that you want the device to play. After that, each time the playback device goes to http://play.playr.biz, it will start playing the channel that has been configured on the settings dashboard.

Wrapping it up...

The number of active screens that count towards your subscription are monitored by the system and a current overview is now available from your settings dashboard. Active screen sessions can be both anonymous sessions (when you simply access a channel's web address directly from some arbitrary web browser) or sessions originating from a registered playback device. So playback devices don't count towards your subscriptions "screen limit", but they are just a more convenient way of setting up and managing your signage screens/signage players.

[bizplay]

what is the size of page 16:9

Any size. Everything adapts to the size of the screen on which you playback your content. Typical sizes are 1280x720 and 1920x1080. 

[bizplay]

Hi, is there a option for viewing a Google Calendar in you solution?

Hi, 

Thanks for your question. We don't have a solution for Google Calendar just yet, but have received a few requests for this recently. As a result, we are looking of ways to enable this. Please let us know how you are thinking of using this; this helps us in trying to meet you requirements as closely as possible.

Thanks,

Pascal LindelaufBizplay

[bizplay]

Digital signage app for Android

These are exciting times. Digital signage hardware is getting cheaper and easier to setup. A very promising platform is Android. Small HDMI sticks that you can plug directly into your TV are becoming more common. Unfortunately, they are still not quite powerful enough to support all types of content. Especially animation might be choppy and video support can be lacking completely. But if you can live without animation and video, then it's great to combine such a device with a Bizplay Smart subscription.  

To make life even easier, we have created the Bizplay Android app that you can install onto any Android device. The beauty is that it automatically starts playing your Bizplay content when you turn it on. In addition, it runs in full screen mode automatically too. Check out our F.A.Q. page for more information about the Bizplay Android app.

[bizplay]

ChromeCast - Great future for low-cost digital signage

Only last week Google released their Chromecast. This dongle can be put into a HDMI port on your TV/screen and then you can use any kind of device (Android phone/tablet, iPhone, iPad, Chromebook, MacBook, …) to indicate what content you want it to play.

At Bizplay we’re obviously very excited about this device, since it would be the perfect low-cost playback device for any web-based digital signage solution. But for it to be ultimately usable in that way, it would have to be able to autonomously playback a webpage (with digital signage content, in our case). Unfortunately, thus far there is only the “Chrome tab cast" feature and this only allows you to stream content from the controlling device directly to the Chromecast device. So to get the Chromecast to show a webpage on your TV screen, you will always have to go through the controlling device. Bummer.

On the upside, it seems the device is open for custom apps, so I’m guessing it is not going to be long before we can actually use the Chromecast as a stand-alone device to render any webpage and thus web-based digital signage content. We’ll certainly be following this very promising device closely!

[bizplay]

Bizplay introduces one low-cost subscription for unlimited screens

Utrecht, NL – Today Bizplay announced new subscription models for their hosted web-based content management system for digital signage. They now fully leverage the power of being a 100% web-based company, by allowing a single subscription to serve an unlimited number of screens/players. Design once, play anywhere for one low monthly or annual fee, starting at $16/month. In addition, there will be an Enterprise subscription tier available shortly. This is specifically aimed at enterprises with a large number of players, and resellers that want to offer customers full-service maintenance contracts. With this tier, players can be monitored and configured remotely. Unlike the regular subscriptions, the Enterprise subscriptions will have an additional charge per screen starting at only $5/month.

About Bizplay

Bizplay is a young company in the digital signage space. Its hosted web-based CMS has been available since March 2012. Bizplay distinguishes itself by being a 100% web-based solution focused on finding the optimum between ease of use, affordability and versatility. Its ease of use allows anyone to create, edit and manage their own content themselves, even on a smartphone or tablet. Both the designer dashboard and player run in a web-browser, so there is no need to install and maintain any proprietary software. Versatility is established through free Bizplay apps that allow you to add online services to your pages instantly, like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Foursquare, Yammer, etc. Bizplay is committed to expand this set of apps constantly. Bizplay is also offers a reseller program for A/V professionals. They can either become an affiliate and offer Bizplay to their customers as-is. Or they can have their own white-labeled version of the service. In less than a day they can start resell the service as if it were their own.

[bizplay]

We got the Intel NUC Core i5 and we thought it was about time that we showed everyone how easy it is to assemble it for use with bizplay.com.

[bizplay]

Great infographic from the people at buysellads.com.

[mariedovidio]

"We are all workers."

Levi’s Billboard

Stefan Sagmeister

[bizplay]

Very clever. Just one of those cool ideas that don't nearly have the same effect on a digital sign.

[bizplay]

New Intel NUCs on their way

Intel NUC's are the Bizplay players of choice. Intel Core-i power in a really small box. That means: really smooth playback of your content in a box that can easily be tucked away behind any screen.

The Core i3 was already a great player at a great price point, but now the Core i5 is about to hit the shelves. Even more power at about a $100 more.

Besides the power, Intel vPro technology is especially interesting in a digital signage setup. It includes Intel AMT technology, which allows you to remotely connect to it even when it's off! So you can remotely turn it on and maintain it like you were connected directly to it. That's great when you have multiple players setup in hard to reach places.

[malinns]

[bizplay]

You do wonder about the effectiveness of all these signs...