1/22/2007 -- Cisco Systems Inc. last week announced Digital Signage, a new offering designed to help organizations manage, publish and playback digital media on networked digital signage displays.

"Cisco's entry into the ... digital signage market reflects growing business demand for rich media signage to optimize their marketing, advertising and training and drive a compelling, high-quality customer experience," said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology Group, in a statement. "Enterprises are beginning to realize the potential of video for many new functions. Cisco Digital Signage ... will help businesses to reach customers and employees with powerful content."

Cisco Digital Signage consists of Cisco's Digital Media Manager and Cisco Digital Media Player. The former is a Web-based application that controls the creation, management and publishing of digital media to digital signage displays. It also performs remote discovery and management for individual digital signs (as well as groups of digital signs) connected to Cisco Digital Media Players. Cisco Digital Media Manager supports playlists, content schedules, customizable templates and role-based access control, along with monitoring and reporting.

Cisco Digital Media Player is a hardware client complement to the backend Digital Media Manager. It's a small form-factor device that can orchestrate the playback of video, graphics and text on digital signage displays. It supports full-screen video or graphical zoning and can handle MPEG 1, 2 and 4 streams in both standard- and high-definition formats.

The upshot, officials say, is that Cisco Digital Signage helps organizations make the most of their interactions with targeted customer audiences for marketing, advertising or communication. A bank, for example, might use digital signage to inform customers who are waiting in line about new services. -- Stephen Swoyer