After 10 years, Cingerine has long since outgrown the cinema niche and its Swiss home market. In 2023, the number of CMS licenses increased by 30 percent with new projects in the Middle East and Europe. In a major development step, the digital signage platform is now being relaunched.
Andy Bohli, owner and CEO of Imaculix, and his Cingerine digital signage platform has been primarily active as a cinema specialist in Switzerland in the first few years. Cingerine now dominates the Swiss cinema landscape with more than 1,000 screens in major cinema chains such as Pathé and Arena. At past DSS conference presentations, the Swiss repeatedly demonstrated unusual software features that are not yet available on the market.
Since 2023, Empire Cinemas with a strong presence in the Middle East, has switched to Cingerine for its luxury cinemas in Saudi Arabia. The multilingual nature of Switzerland was also a location advantage there, as hardly any digital signage system combines Arabic and English so seamlessly. From the CMS to the program display in cinemas, everything is multilingual. Empire Cinemas implemented the full Cingerine package, managing content for everything from concessions menu boards to event control to cinema advertising. As is often the case, only digital signage vertical market experts like Imaculix are able to provide comprehensive end-2-end platforms. It takes vertical market know how of established processes and of backend systems to develop successful solutions.
“The expansion to the Gulf region was a special experience for us, which once again showed how important hardware, software and content are from a single source. “It’s not just in the cinema environment that digital signage providers have to adapt to the local mentality and work processes in order to be successful,” emphasizes Andy Bohli.
By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more
Growth beyond Hollywood
Cingerine has been expanding into the retail media network market for several years. After Toppharm 2021, another large Swiss pharmacy chain, Rotpunkt switched to CIngerine last year. The rapid switch to a new digital signage platform from a supposed nobody caused some disruption in the otherwise well-distributed Swiss digital signage and DooH market.
As invidis learned from industry sources, Cingerine was selected due to its unique GDPR-compliant “on-premise programmatic” concept, the multi-client capability of the CMS and the extremely low power consumption of the media player boxes. The rollout across the 120 Red Point locations was completed by a two-man team in six weeks.
Today’s retail signage clients are looking for fully integrated campaign management and goal-oriented playout. “Simple content loops and playlists are a thing from the past”. Other well-known European retailers are currently testing the Swiss platform. “We believe that we can convince the competition,” confirms Andy Bohli.
Future-proof with gaming innovations
While many competitors are just switching to HTML5, Andy Bohli is already taking a step further: “A neutered browser is not the future of digital signage, but simply the lowest common denominator. When it comes to programmatic in retail media networks, precision and speed counts. With Reactive Real-Time Rendering (RRR), we rely on technology from the gaming industry for guaranteed response times in the millisecond range.”
Cingerine is now also moving to Cingerine 4.0 as a new operating system, an immutable Linux with continuous upgrades. We are already prepared for the EU Cyber Resilience Act, which is due to come into force at the beginning of 2024 and to which, from Andy Bohli’s point of view, the digital signage industry has so far only reacted hesitantly.
The new operating system will be available not only for its own line of digital signage players, but also for SoC platforms. First discussions with display partners are already underway, explains Andy Bohli. “Which competitor can claim to offer everything from a single source, from CMS to player firmware? We are perhaps the most future-proof platform on the market.”
