LiquidIce_ATV

The Apple TV makes a great Digital Signage box. You can deploy these wirelessly, just add power. They can mount right on the back on the LCD/Plasma, and they have a single HDMI cord that connects to the TV providing video and audio. Though they get a little warm, they're small, quiet, and have enough processing power to do one or two things really well.

They just need the right software to do the kinds of things that could be useful for digital signage. For example, the ability to create a playlist and have that playlist loop, would be extremely useful for a corporate lobby, or a museum exhibit.

Another possibility is to have the Apple TV boot up and open a fullscreen application that pulls updated RSS News Feeds throughout the day. The Nintendo Wii has a great example of this, however there is a major flaw, that you can not make the news loop. Once it plays through all of the headlines it goes back to the menu. The app would have to be able to run 24/7 constantly updating it's news feeds.

In a not so distant future it would be exciting to see hardware like this really be used for large digital signage deployments.

I could see someone creating a P2P ad distribution system where a master server distributes advertisement video clips to all of it's peers, and those peers have local software that decides which content to play and logs how many times each commercial was played. Detailed stats can be kept on the device and synced back to the master server.

Once Apple TV is controllable through the network, it will also be possible to send commands to ATVs on the network to tell them to tune into a particular broadcast, or to play a file off the network. To be able to schedule the screens to display different content at certain times throughout the day is a feature that only comes with really expensive digital signage software/hardware.

With a little software that cost goes way down, and with the ever dropping prices of LCDs and Plasmas it's inevitable that people are going to be putting them everywhere and they will want cheap sources to connect and display useful content to them.

I'm glad to see Apple's willingness to allow people to do they things they have been doing with the Apple TV without fighting back. After seeing all the cool things that people do with these boxes, maybe Apple will learn a thing or two for the next version. In the meantime as more cool and useful hacks and applications are developed for these $299 machines, Apple is going to be selling them like crazy.

-LiquidIce
http://appletvhacks.blogspot.com

Lamer980

could you be more explicit for the RC.local file as it could be dangerous..;;-)
many thanx for your job

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LiquidIce_ATV

Another tip for those of you looking to do digital signage with the apple tv. In the latest versions of Quartz Composer you can goto File -> Export As Quicktime and it will make .mov files of any quartz file. Add these to your iTunes and sync, and now your apple tv will be filled with these quartz animations.

It might take a little bit of tweaking, but it should not be hard to add text on top of one of the many quartz animations you can find on the internet for free (or have some fun and make your own).

Using these tips you can make some really great looking signage for a fairly low startup cost. With plasmas so cheap these days it will be interesting to see what people can create to display on all of them.

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-LiquidIce

LiquidIce's Apple TV Hacks
http://appletvhacks.blogspot.com