Las Vegas | The world’s largest online retailer has been active in the digital signage market since October. With annual sales of USD 575 billion (2023), Amazon is playing in a different league in the digital signage industry, which is dominated by SMEs. Established market players are smiling at Amazon’s market entry, but are showing nerves at the same time.
DSE just wrapped up in Las Vegas, and from a European perspective, the trip across the North Atlantic is no longer worthwhile. Only 50 exhibitors, hardly any hardware manufacturers. In contrast, the neighboring hall of the AV rental trade show and sister event LDI was fully booked and well attended.
But despite the mini-exhibition, themes were set in Las Vegas. This week, the digital signage event was dominated by Amazon’s market entry, although they are not exhibiting at all. As invidis reported, Amazon is offering, for now just in North America, a low-cost digital signage solution, the Amazon Signage Stick. The HDMI stick was primarily developed for consumer TVs and simple professional screens without SoC. However, professional screens with an outdated SoC can also be used for longer with the Signage Stick.
At https://signage.amazon.com/index.html, the online retailer presents the first digital signage solution made by Amazon. The media player is said to be easy to install, the tech stack has been specially hardened for B2B use, the connection to Amazon’s cloud service AWS should enable maximum performance and the biggest advantage: it is from Amazon. Just a few hours after ordering, the signage stick is already in your letterbox. Two clicks and one of the twelve pre-installed CMS is running on the media player.
Current Amazon Signage Stick partners are:
- Ablesign
- Neon
- Novisign
- Optisign
- Play Digital Signage
- Poster Booking
- Poppulo
- Rise Vision
- Screencloud
- Yodeck
The Signage Stick is not intended for large digital signage installations. The sweet spot of the USD 100 media player is small digital signage networks with 20 to 50 screens. However, according to market rumors, Amazon does not want to leave it at the Signage Stick, further professional offers are to follow. Whether a SoC version will also be included – Amazon has also been offering its own TV screens and monitors for several months – is unclear. There is a certain nervousness in the American digital signage market when discussions turn to Amazon.
Germany is Amazon’s second largest market after the USA, followed by the UK and Japan. A future market entry is considered likely.