I wish I wasn't writing this.
Our company briefly trialled a brightsign media player recently. It worked really well and could handle full HD video without any problems, which was impressive. Most of us figured that Brightsign was the perfect solution for our company to provide to our customers.
We submitted a proposal to a customer last week who is wanting to install over 150 players. We put together a package including the players and Brightsign Network.
However, over the past few days we have been looking into Brightsign more, and feel that we've made a bad choice. Although the media players are robust, there are certain parts of Brightsign Author that need some attention from the developers, and Brightsign has some catching up to do to compete with other digital signage providers :
- BrightAuthor doesn't have any form of preview feature. Looking though the forums, this has been requested many times, and several years since the first request, it still hasn't been implimented. It's like driving blind !
- Creating layouts in portrait orientation is difficult. I believe this is the only digital signage software where you have to physically turn your head 90 degrees in order to create layouts vertically. And even if you've got content that is designed for portrait display, you then have to manually rotate it before uploading to BrightAuthor. Terrible.
- Scheduled content can't overlap. If you have a morning playlist, and an afternoon playlist, but you want them to both overlap and both play during lunchtime, you can't do it. You manually have to create a 3rd playlist with the content from the other 2, and then schedule it in between them both. Boy, what a hassle !
These are just a few things which don't work well and require 'work arounds'. As it stands, we would be embarrased to supply Brightsign to our customer, and are actively trialling other solutions, which so far have been much better.
Our prediction is that in 5 years time, Brightsign wil have caught up with where other software products are now - would have finally implimented the requests of it's users, and will include into Brightsign features like weather, QR codes, scrolling text, animations, etc ...
... the only thing is that all of the competition would've moved much further ahead and have even more superior products than Brightsign by then.
Very disappointing Brightsign. Perhaps take some of your marketing / tradeshow budget and put it into the development budget. Afterall, is there really much point in pushing people to buy your product, when your product has fallen behind all of the competition ?
