By Mic Wilborn
— January 22nd, 2026
How often do you just sit and stare lovingly at the big TV in your home, marveling at its sheer size and sleek lines, without ever turning it on?
Never, right?
Because screens are all about the content—attracting, engaging and informing viewers. The value of those big slabs of electronics, glass and plastic is tied entirely to what’s displayed on them.
The same applies to networked digital signage screens used for anything from workplace communications to retail marketing and mass transport information and guidance. Screens are most effective when they’ve been programmed and populated with timely, relevant content.
But you wouldn’t know that from the way the technology is marketed.
Companies with the deepest product and trade show marketing pockets all talk about pixels, and brightness, form factor and whatever technology terms seem “buzzy” at the moment. They endlessly recycle the “Content Is King” adage, and then spend their time talking much more about display and media player specs.
Far from being the “king” in planning and execution, content is often an after-thought. Anyone charged with deploying and managing digital signage networks can tell stories of installing networks of screens, and then getting asked, late in the project, for ideas of what to “run” on those screens.
Trapped By Mindsets
Much of the industry seems trapped in a hardware-centric mindset, when well-executed visual communications networks are all about—surprise—the visuals and messages, and the modern, highly-integrated and nimble platforms that drive them.
We are well past the pioneering days of this technology, when programming was based on assembling images and videos into ordered playlists, and then sending those files and schedule instructions out to media players, to play one after another in loops. It was all very manual, time-consuming, and rigid.
A lot of digital signage content management systems still work much like that, because they were either built years ago and remain somewhat locked into their software designs and limitations, or newer systems were modeled after what was already out there. Unfortunately, a lot of CMS providers stopped innovating years ago.
But not all of them left their innovation back in the early 2000s. Modern digital signage platforms like Poppulo are, by comparison, hyper-nimble, operating in the cloud, and built with automation and AI in mind. That reflects the expectations of today’s enterprise users, who demand agility, security, and operating architectures that fit with an organization’s workflows.
Put more simply, enterprises want tools that work and interact with the other tools that run and drive their businesses.
Modern Matters
Here’s the approach we’ve found ticks the boxes of our end-users and business partners:
Seamless integrations using APIs available from other business platforms means content is dynamic and largely automated—which results in on-screen content reflecting what’s currently happening, not what was planned days or weeks earlier when a playlist was being built by the operator.
Done right, business systems are sharing information and set up for things like triggered events. Here’s a simple example: if screens around a hotel property indicate the name, timing and occupants of a meeting or ballroom space, when the property’s separate booking system indicates an event has ended and assigned a new event, the API shares that data and the changes are automatically reflected on the screens, without any operator intervention.
Visualizing data for KPI and control room dashboards reflects real-time information, not snapshots of what happened (and may have changed).
Integrations can tie into everything from inventory management and passenger information systems to external data like weather, traffic, and public safety systems.
Software as a Service (SaaS) means cloud-based capabilities, used on subscription, take the infrastructure and security burdens off operators. Multiple clients can share resources but fully isolate their data and controls. A well-designed and supported SaaS platform has the elasticity to meet spikes in demand, without needing more hardware or affecting service delivery.
Careful adherence to contemporary security initiatives means platforms are locked down, data is encrypted and access is controlled, based on things like roles defined by the operator. Poppulo has put the work and time into realizing business-critical enterprise security certifications like ISO 27001 and SOC 2.
While “old school” CMS platforms may need to push out or make available to pull payloads of media assets and things like JSON code files, modern systems operate much more like web-servers, using lightweight and flexible URLs.
Artificial intelligence should be central to how content is put together and presented, but not at the expense of quality or relevance. Most digital signage solutions now work AI into descriptions of what they do or use, but their AI-powered offer may be nothing more than a tie-in to image generation tools available in many other ways.
Meeting The Shift
Digital signage platforms were regarded for many years as an interesting complement to efforts surrounding business communications, venue marketing, and information systems.
But as the technology has matured and real-world user experience has built up, the technology has shifted in many organizations from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have.” Digital signage is now firmly part of the mix used to inform and engage—because unlike emails, intranets, apps and other tools, screens don’t need to be opened and read. They’re just there, steadily conveying bold, visual, and targeted information.
The technology is at its most effective and impactful when the focus is on the content, with the underlying technology designed and optimized to ensure that content is always relevant, timely, engaging and difference-making.
The broad sense is that a greater focus on relevant content and automation is the direction the industry and ecosystem needs to take. The good news: Poppulo is already there.