EPISODE 186 | Guest: Matt DuBois, director of partner sales for BrightSign
Digital signage doesn’t work without a media player, and BrightSign makes the most popular one in the world. The iconic purple box has long been the hardware backbone behind countless digital signage deployments across virtually every industry, and the new Series 6 takes things a step further by building AI capabilities directly into the player for the first time.
AI in digital signage is still in its early stages, but it can now power use cases that were out of reach just a few years ago – from safety detection on manufacturing floors to personalized retail experiences. The technology is evolving quickly, and this episode explores what that means for the future of the medium and why the best applications may not even be invented yet.
- Discover why BrightSign is the world’s most popular digital signage player
- Understand why a purpose-built OS strengthens security and reliability
- Learn how AI has been integrated into the new Series 6 player lineup
- Explore real-world AI use cases already emerging across industries
- Hear why the possibilities for AI in digital signage are still just getting started
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Learn more about BrightSign Series 6 players here.
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: For many people in the digital signage space, the purple box is rather well-known and well-regarded. That is the flagship product of BrightSign, a company that makes, as they put it, end-to-end digital signage solutions to help businesses, basically use digital signage on lots of different kinds of platforms. And their newest type of player is out – the Series 6.
And we’ve talked about BrightSign in the past (there’ll be a link in the transcript), but today we’re gonna talk about the new Series 6 players and the current state of the art and the future of the purple box BrightSign player.
To help me discuss that today, I will be speaking with Matt DuBois, Director of Partner Sales for BrightSign. Hi Matt. Thanks for coming on.
Matt DuBois: Hey, Derek, thanks for having me today. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to chatting with you.
Derek DeWitt: Absolutely. And thank you everybody out there for listening. I remind you; you can subscribe and review and share and all that stuff, and there is a transcript on the Visix website with links that will help you get even more information than what we talk about.
So, BrightSign, the purple box; it’s famous in the industry.
Matt DuBois: I’ve been working with BrightSign for eight years, and I always get comments about why is our box purple and that kind of thing. And I think, honestly, I don’t know that I have a good story to go with the purple box. It is really just a distinguishing color, and it leads to a lot of great interest. So, you know, having something behind the screen that’s not black is always a good jumping off point. But yeah, it’s been a lot of fun working here for the last eight years or so.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, my wife and I were at ISE in Barcelona this year, and we noticed, like, of course the booth was very purple, including many of the floor show employees’ shoes were even purple. We were like, wow. They really leaned into this purple business.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had purple shoes for quite some time, and we always get a lot of comments on it. And to be honest, I came from a company previously that used to make me wear dress shoes. I’m a big fan of the purple sneakers. So, when you’re on your feet for three, four days in a row, that’s kind of a nice little fringe benefit they throw our way.
Derek DeWitt: That’s true. Comfortable and stylish all at once.
Matt DuBois: You got it. You got it.
Derek DeWitt: So, you are the director of partner sales. What does that mean?
Matt DuBois: Yeah, so, as a director of partner sales, I’ve been in this role for about three years. Previously was in sales for BrightSign, covering the Pacific Northwest and all of Canada. But in this role, I’m working day to day with our partners, executing plans and goals about where we’re trying to take our joint solutions. ‘Cause at the, you know, every day, I think it’s important to note that we’re a hardware platform, right? And that our software partners are really what make us and take us to this next level. So, you know, it is a dedicated appliance just meant for signage, which means that the OS is built and optimized to do what it’s doing all day long, every day.
Derek DeWitt: It’s quite robust. I think that’s one of the reasons people like it is they’re very robust devices.
Matt DuBois: Yeah. It’s almost a set-and-forget kind of thing. What I love is it, like, the OS itself is built from the ground up to just do exactly what it does. And these things are meant to run 24/7 without any interaction from any person. You can be sitting here in Seattle, and I can be chatting with someone in California or in Europe, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, if a sign needs to be worked on or needs to be updated in any form or fashion, you don’t want to have to have feet in front of that screen. You want to be able to do that remotely. And I think that’s really where BrightSign and the OS and those purple boxes that me and you speak so fondly of really kind of matter at the end of the day.
Derek DeWitt: So, now let’s talk the new Series 6. Obviously, there were five series before this, would be my guess. And now we have the HD6, the XD6, and the XS6. Three new products.
Matt DuBois: Yeah. I think it’s important to note, like, the line, the purple boxes, the BrightSign players go from an LS5 up to an XC5 at this moment. The 5 Series is still available in our current LS5 and XT5, but the new ones, HD6 and XD6, are shipping right now. There is an entry level version, which is the LS5 all the way up to the XT5. And that really, what you want to use, I guess at the end of the day, is the product that works right with your content.
So the big changes that come along with the XD6 is really the neural processing unit, or NPU, which I’ll probably reference a couple times is NPU, and Derek, maybe you can stop me in my tracks and get me to slow down, but it is the neural processing unit, which is really our AI capabilities built into our platform. So that is the big game changer when it comes to the Series 6 and the HD6 and XD6 lines.
Derek DeWitt: So, the AI is optimizing output, things like that?
Matt DuBois: No. So, this is basically where the players, including the XT5 and LS5, have neural processing units. And what they are is basically enabling AI capabilities. So, AI I think is in its infancy, and a lot of times people kind of think about AI as ChatGPT or something like that. You know, as the use cases evolve, what you’re gonna be able to do with signage I think is really, really cool.
With an inexpensive camera today, you can, with a BrightSign player, capture, you know, someone…. Some of the use cases that I throw around are a manufacturing floor, right? Somebody’s gotta be wearing a hard hat. Maybe a sign outside of that manufacturing floor as people walk in can stop someone and say, “Hey, stop, turn around. Go get your hard hat.” Or “Put your hard hat on your head” as you walk into the building.
Derek DeWitt: Wow. That’s both cool and a little creepy nanny state all at once.
Matt DuBois: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, when you talk about safety and that kind of thing, I think it’s really, really cool. And you talk about creepy as well, all of that triggering is done on the player itself. There’s no going back to the cloud for that information, because it recognizes that you don’t have, let’s say it’s a purple helmet or a red one; it just recognizes that you don’t have it on and it switches, it triggers that sign to say, “Hey, stop, turn around. Go get your hard hat.”
Derek DeWitt: That is super cool. I think that’s a very cool feature.
Matt DuBois: Yeah. Yeah.
Derek DeWitt: I’ve been predicting that this is basically what’s gonna happen is that, you know, we’ll start seeing things pairing with cameras and other types of sensing devices. ‘Cause the goal, everything is eventually the web, everything, everything is eventually going to become bespoke. People will get the content that is intended for them specifically. We’re not there yet, but we will, I think, get there. So that you and I walking through, let’s say a shopping center, I look to the right, you look to the left and looking at digital signs, we would, in this theoretical future, be fed different content because the system knows so much about us.
Matt DuBois: My mind kind of explodes with capabilities and possibilities, and I think, you know, there is a little bit of maybe not understanding how it works. But when I talk about our players and the fact that every one of our players now has an NPU built into it, I think it’s about that future proofing, right? Like, maybe you’re not using AI today. Maybe you don’t know the use cases today, but in the future, and one of the things I really love about signage is the growth, right? Like you start with maybe a simpler use case, but then you kind of get familiar with what you want to do, use case changes slightly, and our products are kind of future proofing a little bit when it comes to the AI capabilities.
Derek DeWitt: The HD6, it really does, like, ultra-high-def video, right?
Matt DuBois: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s a workhorse for us at the end of the day. Very smooth animations, can do 4K and all, you know, the typical things you can do with a player. As you step up into, like, the XD6, you have enhanced performance for HTML, you have, you know, 4K, dual 4K capabilities. And then you also have, on the hardware side of things, PoE, which is a more and more common request, especially as we work with corporate signage and the like.
Derek DeWitt: Sure, yeah. Yeah. That’s always a big thing for, like, Visix’s room signs. The fact that they’re Power over Ethernet is great because it just reduces the cabling.
Matt DuBois: Yep, absolutely. And those small form factors, I think it’s important to kind of like keep them as simple as possible, right? And talking about small form factors, the XS6 is one that I haven’t chatted about yet. The XS6 is identical to the XD6, and really for those applications where someone may want the XD6 built into the monitor. So, we have customers like Bluefin and others that are out there that can actually give you that form factor of a system on a chip but built into that monitor.
Derek DeWitt: Wow. And yet it still does full HD, 4K, 60 hertz, but it’s, the whole thing, but on a chip.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, absolutely. It’s built into the monitor. It’s identical, feature-wise to an XD6. So, I think, you know, for those applications, and what I’m excited about is the ability to kind of do more. This is a new product for us, obviously. And as you do more, whether it’s a Power BI integration or more HTML that you’re throwing at your screens, the bottom line is like, this is a very capable player to kind of make sure you’re not getting that stuttering that you might have experienced before on a lower-end player.
Derek DeWitt: I know security is important, obviously for everybody, but it’s especially important for higher education clients and government clients, especially. They’re always like, security, security, security. Are there upgrades to security features with the new Series 6, or have you guys kind of already optimized that and you don’t really need to do more?
Matt DuBois: We continue to optimize that, and it doesn’t matter what player you have. Right now, we are supporting our Series 4, 5, and 6, and continuing to update our OSs, which is unique in the signage world. You know, security is no longer a checkbox. It’s something that everyone is taking very, very seriously.
And I think as BrightSign and part of the OS, our attack surface is much smaller than some of our competitors out there because it is a dedicated, purpose-built operating system. And what that means is there’s no bloat, right? There’s no, you know, email, there’s no additional software that is running on that hardware that doesn’t need to be there at the end of the day.
Derek DeWitt: Ah, that’s great. I think lean is secure.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think when you’re looking at a BrightSign player, it is, from the beginning, meant to do one thing, and that one thing is show signage, and show that signage 24/7 with little interaction between the sign and the operator at the end of the day.
Derek DeWitt: Now, you said you’ve been with BrightSign for eight years. The digital signage world in some ways is young, if you want to take sort of a long view of things; in other ways, it’s been around 25, some people could even argue 30 years. And, you know, when Visix started out, there weren’t that many people in the space. And now it’s, I mean, it’s flooded, and there’s been a lot of talk lately about how the digital signage industry is kind of maturing, and there’s concern that eventually everybody’s gonna have it. And then what happens?
Like, what do you think is gonna happen? Do you think continuing to create innovations like these neural networks and AI capabilities are going to allow at least certain companies to continue to expand? Or are we gonna just eventually hit a saturation point?
Matt DuBois: I hear the concern, and I kind of just go back to walking around some of the businesses that I get to frequent from day to day. And I still see static signage out there. I was recently in a DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles, and they have all these, you know, statements, right? Like all these things that, you know, they’re doing for back of house, like, you know, whether it’s you gotta take your breaks or whatever it is, and those things change over time. And when you have a diverse office space, right, like multiple offices across the state, across the country, across the world, it’s important to get your messaging out to these people.
And, you know, even though there’s this talk of contracting, what I found is it is expanding. And then on top of that, when people start working with signage, I think the use case changes over time. And there’s more of these show pieces that are coming out for the front of lobbies or in a retail application.
I was at the mall recently around Christmas time, taking my kids to see Santa Claus, and there was this cool signage applications that my kids spent 30 minutes there just playing in front of the screen. And what it was is they were elves, they took their face, right, and they could dance up and down this thing and the elf would follow on the screen. Like, with signage, you can get so creative and appeal to your audience in so many different ways that it’s gonna continue to expand.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s, that’s actually an interesting point. I think that very often the technology then just kind of creates more possibilities. You know, people might go, why do I need this? You know, why do we want, you know, a thing that lets kids, you know, look like they’re elves? 30 minutes, that’s why! 30 minutes in today’s short attention span world, children, 30 minutes is a lifetime. Most people would kill for 30 minutes of engagement, even when, you know, talking to their colleagues or family members. I’d kill for 30 uninterrupted minutes of attention.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, too, you know, when you talk about just putting that back into a corporate market, right, or a corporate company, some people aren’t connected, some people don’t have email. And getting these important messages out to them and them seeing them is really important.
So, you know, a lot of people are doing more with back of house signage and things like that, lunch rooms, break rooms, manufacturing floors. You know, getting them to see the messaging, whether it’s health enrollment, something like that. Like, those things matter. And if they don’t get seen, it could impact later in the year, later in that guy’s life.
Derek DeWitt: For sure. There, there can be real world consequences to those sort of thing. Do you think it’s sort of a pan-market growth still happening? Or are there specific markets where you’re seeing more growth?
Matt DuBois: Yeah, I think our, like, biggest growth right now is, I mean, we’re seeing a ton in retail and QSR, healthcare continues to evolve, higher education I think is also looking at things as well. Campuses continue to grow bigger, and I think information is power.
I always tell a story of walking through an airport and not knowing exactly where I need to be and wanting there to be signage somewhere to tell me where I need to go. And sometimes the signage, you know, static signage, it’s out of date. Maybe like construction has changed, they don’t want you to walk this way, they want you to walk the other way. Chicago O’Hare Airport, I could not figure out. Chicago is originally kind of my home, and I could not figure out where they moved to a train system. And I hadn’t been there to get to the rental car facility. I’m used to riding the buses.
As they continue to evolve, you’re seeing more and more airports, more and more of these facilities just kind of say, all right, we understand that if nothing else, hey, my flight’s an hour delayed, I can relax for another 15, 20, 30 minutes before I have to get to the gate. So, that to me is, like, you know, as a guy that gets on a plane every once in a while, that to me is worth its weight in gold.
Derek DeWitt: Do you have any sort of use cases, kind of cool use cases, that pop to mind?
Matt DuBois: I do a lot with our partners in corporate signage. I do some retail from time to time. But we have a gentleman, or a gentleman that I work with who’s doing some things with… he does things with movies.
Just recently, and it’s more of an experience than anything else. He doing these premieres, right? And they have these show pieces and those kind of things as you walk in. And he’s getting ready to do some things, I believe it’s with He-Man, Masters of the Universe. And he kind showed me some of these things, and he is triggering content, he’s doing different things like, and I don’t know the specifics on this one, but you know, where you can see, you know, yourself dressed up as one of the characters and things like that. It’s just, those are the kind of things that I think are really, really cool. They’re experiences more. And I think, you know, signage kind of goes in that route, right? It’s experiencing more.
Derek DeWitt: Maybe we’re gonna eventually move beyond just delivering information into actually helping craft and manufacture experiences for people. It’s a digital world, and as I always say about digital signage, when we give advice on how to make engaging content, is your stuff needs to be more interesting than whatever the person is looking at on their phone.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, absolutely. You’re in a race for eyes. And I mean, I’m a big sports guy. You go to a ballpark today, it doesn’t matter if it’s baseball, football or whatnot, they’re competing with a lot of other items, including your phone, which can entertain you. Like, if you cannot keep people engaged with what’s going on in the ballpark… I was at a game recently, and it’s an older facility and there was no IPTV on the outside when I went to go get some food. And I was like, well, I can’t see what’s going on with the game, this kind of stinks. And the times we live in…
Derek DeWitt: Right! Apparently, I have to make a choice, you know?
Matt DuBois: Right, exactly. I’m like, you know, my kids either are very hungry, or I can stay involved in the game and go from there. So it was, you know, those are the kind of things that I think will continue to expand upon when it comes to signage.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, did the whole shift to hybrid work, I think the conversation is finally almost over. You know, the media went back and forth about like, oh, you know, CEOs don’t like it and they want people back in the office. And a lot of people are like, well, I’m not going to, I’ll just go work for another company. And I think people have learned their lessons and like hybrid work’s here to stay and that’s just the end of the conversation. Has this affected things? Have you seen any increase in demand?
Matt DuBois: Yeah, yeah. I definitely have seen, as the footprints of these offices have changed, you know, room booking, hot desk management, just knowing what’s going on within the building, what rooms are getting used and what rooms aren’t. There’s valuable data in that. And I think signage can really help tell people where they need to be.
You know, I can be sitting, you know, at my desk and need to book a meeting for Tuesday and you know, when I go to the office on a Tuesday, I know that that room is booked and it has my name, my team’s name, whatever that is, on there. And I think that is really kind of how things have continued to evolve. So yeah, it’s definitely impacted us for the better, I would argue. It’s almost as people may have gotten smaller footprints, they modernized their footprint as well.
Derek DeWitt: Tighten it up and streamline it.
Matt DuBois: Exactly. Efficiency. Efficiency, efficiency.
Derek DeWitt: Do you think that we’re gonna see more AI integration? Like, like I said, we were at ISE and everybody was claiming AI in some way, shape, or form. But then when I asked them specifically, so what exactly is the AI in your product, they kind of threw out a bunch of jargon and kind of danced around it. And I was like, oh, this is “AI washing”.
Do we think we’re gonna see more applications of this as things get more and more complicated? ‘Cause especially LLMs, large language models, they are changing at such an accelerated growth rate, by Christmas this year they’ll have evolved into a whole new thing.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I do think you’ll see more AI applications across signage as a whole. I mean, like I said earlier, we are trying to make AI accessible across our player lineup. And I think if you’re not using it today, you probably will be using it in the near future.
One thing to note is the NPU is baked into the hardware. It’s not pulling resources from other, like the GPU and whatnot. But I think about it, and this is where my mind really explodes, Derek, it’s motion detection, object detection. Am I, like you mentioned earlier, am I looking in a certain direction? Am I engaged with that sign? And then personalization, right? They’ll know, like, if I’m a gentleman, it’s selling me, you know, potentially pants, and if I’m a lady selling me potentially dresses and what not.
Derek DeWitt: Or vice versa, because you know, the times they are changing.
Matt DuBois: Absolutely. Absolutely. Another good use case for AI that I was chatting with our CTO and founder, Jeff Hastings, was, you know, in boardrooms, right, or meeting rooms. If someone leaves trash, like, we’re having a long two-, three-hour meeting, whatever it is, and you get up and you leave some trash, with AI you could potentially signal to the right person, like, hey, this room needs to be cleaned up before the next meeting, and kind of go from there. I think there’s some really cool use cases, and we’re only starting to scratch the surface on some of this stuff.
Derek DeWitt: Wow. Then you go to the analytics on the backend and you’re like, hey, Ralph, you’re a dirty pig. You need to stop leaving tissues under the chair.
Matt DuBois: Yes. Don’t put your gum underneath the chair anymore.
Derek DeWitt: Exactly. What are you a child? This is a boardroom, dammit!
So, that’s all very interesting that this is the direction that BrightSign is starting to go. Any idea what’s on the roadmap? What’s coming up for Series 7, 8, 9?
Matt DuBois: Not from a series 7, 8, 9, and, you know, I can tell you that we’re working very hard with what we call our control offerings or remote device management. And you’ll see some of this at InfoComm as well. One of the things that we really pride ourselves on is what we call Control. Control Cloud is free, and really what it gives the customer the ability to do, or the operator, is really know what’s going on with their players in the field. So, if someone calls me and says, the player’s not showing the right content, I can take a snapshot.
One of my favorite use cases for this, someone says, hey, the screen is not showing anything. It could be as simple, literally as someone taking, like a cleaner came by and accidentally unplugged an HDMI cable. You’re gonna be able to see that in Control and just say, hey, it does, it looks like the player’s showing content. Can you check the HDMI and make sure that it’s plugged in, and that kind of thing? Like, our Control offering is really a differentiator when it comes to the players, and it comes free with every player that you get.
Derek DeWitt: Wow. That’s fantastic. And you know, I think that’s the, that’s supposed to be the purpose of technology is it’s supposed to make things easier, faster, more efficient. But things like these control systems that you’ve integrated into the purple box, they seem like they really genuinely do save time.
Matt DuBois: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s the whole thing. Rolling a truck is expensive, right? Like, no one wants to do that. And then if we give the customer or the operator means to fix a problem without having to physically put feet in front of that screen, I think that is well worth its weight. I mean, it is something that we continue to evolve on, and I’m excited that there’s some things coming out at InfoComm around this that’ll take our offering to kind of the next level.
Derek DeWitt: All right. So InfoComm, of course, is coming up. It’s in Las Vegas this year. It bounces back and forth between Orlando and Las Vegas. And the purple box will be there. What’s gonna be shown in the booth? Series 6, obviously.
Matt DuBois: Yep. Our Series 6 players will be there, and we’re kind of breaking out the booth into different vignettes by verticals. So, you know, please stop by, we’re in Booth 5301 in the Central Hall, and we’ll have all of the latest gear. Some stuff, I’ve already teased a little bit, and some things that I don’t wanna get too far in front of myself here at this point. So, I’m pretty excited about our booth design and Vegas is always super-hot, but I’d rather take the dry heat over Orlando humidity any day.
Derek DeWitt: Oh boy. That’s for sure. Though you know, every woman I know is like, and then we walk in indoors and it’s freezing cold.
Matt DuBois: Very true, very true.
Derek DeWitt: So, the purple box of BrightSign has come out with Series 6, which is really kind of a very different animal in many ways. And if you go to InfoComm in Las Vegas this June, you will be able to see all the cool things that it can do. It will open up the possibilities available to you. It will make things more efficient and more streamlined. And hey, isn’t that really at the end of the day, what we all want?
Well, I’d like to thank Matt DuBois, director of partner sales for BrightSign for talking to me today about the new Series 6 and AI and where we are in the digital signage industry as 2026 continues. Thanks for talking to me, Matt. Super interesting stuff. And, like you, I get quite excited about the possibilities of what digital signage is capable of.
Matt DuBois: Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you having me on. And, you know, if anybody gets to Vegas, please stop by. I’d love to say hi to you.
Derek DeWitt: Excellent, excellent. And of course, I’d like to thank everybody out there for listening. I remind you once again, there is a transcript on the Visix website under Resources.