ISE 2026: Amazon Is Getting Serious About Signage

At CES in Las Vegas earlier this month, there was no escaping Amazon’s Fire TV campaign. Across the city’s most prominent DooH locations, Amazon showcased the biggest overhaul of the Fire TV platform in five years. The company also introduced Ember, a new sub-brand for Amazon’s own TV portfolio, first presented at CES and which will become a permanent label for all Amazon displays going forward.

Barcelona will not see the same level of Amazon-branded dominance in public spaces next week at ISE. But that does not make the company’s ambitions any smaller. Over the past year, Amazon has rapidly expanded its CMS partner ecosystem and upgraded its HDMI-based media player platform specifically for signage applications. The latest step is the introduction of a broad Remote Device Management API – something not yet seen in this level of maturity from an HDMI stick.

Background on Amazon
Amazon has over 310 million active customer accounts globally generating $638 billion annually as of 2024-2025. Around 180 million customers are very loyal Prime members. The vast majority (82%) of its traffic originates in the US. Additional markets include Germany ($41bn), UK ($38bn), as well as Japan and India.

The new RDM functionality enables operators to remotely control display power settings, schedule operating hours, restart or reset media players, and monitor system health, including CPU load, temperature, memory allocation, storage capacity, network status, and Wi-Fi signal strength. Amazon is even adding proof-of-play capabilities: capturing and documenting actual onscreen content, a requirement for DooH operations.

With this, Amazon is closing a feature gap that previously kept HDMI stick solutions out of professional projects. The company has the potential to dominate this very segment – a segment that is enormous in scale. With 310 million active customers worldwide, Amazon commands a distribution reach unmatched in the signage industry.

Despite its growing ambitions, Amazon will not have its own booth at ISE 2026. The Fira Gran Via fairgrounds at ISE are essentially at the limit of their capacity, and new exhibitors will likely need to wait until the expansion scheduled for 2028. Still, Amazon will be more than visible. Many CMS vendors will feature Amazon-powered setups at their stands, with the Remote Device Management API taking center stage.

Inside Amazon’s Digital Signage Strategy
invidis will analyze Amazon’s digital signage strategy in the DSS ISE Keynote on ISE Wednesday. More information about DSS ISE on the official website.

For now, Amazon is not entering digital signage with its own line of professional displays, and there are no official signals pointing to such a step. Yet the introduction of Ember TVs and the accelerated rollout of Fire TV’s professional capabilities make it hard to imagine that Amazon is not at least evaluating a future fully integrated signage solution.

Anyone who previously dismissed Amazon’s signage initiatives as a casual experiment should look again. The potential is substantial, the developer support is robust, and Amazon’s retail customer base is massive. Amazon is not simply testing the waters – it is positioning itself to become a serious and possibly disruptive player in the digital signage market.