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Digital Signage Network Playlog Standards

Version 1.1 of the digital signage network playlog standards was released August 23, 2006. The standards were developed to give industry players some consistency across different networks. The report was put together by William Wu from DS-IQ, Jeff Porter from Scala, Steve Saxe from 3M, Matt Nelson from Avocent, Berk Cotter from POPAI. The POPAI Digital Signage Committee was heavily involved in the development of the digital signage network playlog standards.

The reference system calls for each player in operation to generate a playlog report. The standards document is intended to outline the POPAI Digital Signage committee's recommendation for the format of the playlog. A digital signage netowork playlog is defined as a collection of information created from the digital signage system reflecting the content played, the system performance, and other data. There are several industry synonyms for a network playlog, including billing log, audit log, performance log, and proof-of-play report.

Playlogs are usually set up with each individual player generating its own network playlog report, and sending it back to the server at a pre-defined interval for further consolidation with other reports. The idea is that the finalized report can be presented to a user, or fed in to various analytical or reporting services for further consideration. They can also be used to showing media buyers proof that thier content is running when promised.

There have been variations in how items are recorded by the different media players. Some digital signage players record every event, while others simply record any exceptions from the expected schedule. The digital signage network plalog standards report is not intended to deal with these differences, but rather it is intended to focus on the actual information that is stored, and how it can be used.

The report outlines several key requirements in its overview. These include:

Adaptability - It can cover broadly what people care about and adapt to most of the existing implementation with little change.
Manageability - It can be used as the key information in managing a digital signage network.
Extensibility - It allows future expansion for various digital signage applications.
Scalability - Its existence does not provide a hardship when the network scales larger.
Easy to implement - The effort to generate such log and any value-added services (e.g. reporting, analytics) are reasonable.

The report does recognize that the success of the digital signage network playlog standard is contingent on widespread vendor participation. XML was adopted as the format, which will ensure the playlog can be plugged in to a wide array of applications. It can also be easily converted to other formats. The report also notes that ideally the playlog generation function should be an included function of the digital signage soluton software.

The playlog should contain all required information for proof of performance at the per content item level.

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