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The importance of NTP in digital signage
First of all, Happy New Year to all our readers – we hope you had a relaxing break and are energised for another year of digital signage. To kick off the year, we decided to engage our techie community and discuss about the importance of NTP.
NTP stands for Network Time Protocol and is commonly used to synchronise a computer’s/digital signage player’s date and time with a specific time source server. It can be a hardware based GPS time source server from Symmetricon which I’ve used in the past, an Internet NTP server – see ntp.org for more information, or even your local Windows Active Directory Server can be used as a time server. The most challenging part when using NTP is ensuring that your actual source server has the correct date and time.
Most digital signage businesses should know what I’m talking about since ensuring the Content Management Server and digital signage player’s date and time are all in synch is crucial for any large digital signage network especially when used for scheduling content.
Great article.
Thanks for your positive comments richard and robert. I see digital signage moving towards or even potentially replacing broadcast TV and having worked in this industry, I definitely know “time is of the essence”.
We’ve had situations whereby the player’s time was not synched or did not have the correct daylight savings setting and this really messed up the content scheduling for our client. I’m sure other digital signage businesses must have experience the same situations we have.
I agree with the other commentator, great article. I thnk the importartance of synchronisation will become increasingy more important as digital signage gets more sophisticated. I can imagine people downloading content directly from live streams and distributing around a signage network – I also think more interaction with digital signage will be the way forward and I can imagine NTP servers and other time synchronisation tools becoming more important.
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