Amazon Adding Signage Displays Is A Sign The Giant Isn't Just Dabbling

Amazon is adding a smart display to its U.S. digital signage product line, according to an article published by invidis.com, a move that expands a lineup already built around the Amazon Signage Stick. The same product listing carries conflicting sales figures — "1K+ bought in past month" in one place and "100K+ orders for this brand in past 3 months" in another — and the larger number, the article suggests, likely reflects consumer sticks rather than signage units. For a small business, that means signage hardware can be ordered alongside everyday supplies and arrive within days, with sourcing, staging, shipping and support off the desk.

The Hardware Lineup

The recently announced Amazon Signage Display is a 55-inch 4K unit priced at $699 USD. It leverages more than a decade of system-on-chip smart display experience. The software ecosystem whose CMS apps run on the Signage Stick can load, launch and run those apps directly on the display, removing the need for an external stick. Amazon is not new to displays: it already has a smart TV lineup, and smart TVs have historically been expanded into smart signage displays, as happened with Samsung and its fast-follower LG.

The original Amazon Signage Stick emerged after years of smaller software companies getting their platforms to work on consumer Fire TV sticks, which cost as little as $30. Those sticks came from a well-known brand rather than an Android hardware firm that might change builds and firmware without notice. Amazon then reworked the hardware and software to make the stick more commercial-use ready, stripping out bloat such as TV streaming apps and setting it to boot by default to the chosen signage app, which raised the unit cost to $100. It is very likely these Fire TV units come off TCL manufacturing lines, though Amazon does not state this formally, and smaller displays at lower price points, such as a 50-inch model, are logical additions over time. The displays are rated "prosumer" — a hybrid of consumer TVs and commercial displays — rated for 16/7 rather than 24/7 usage, and may carry different warranties and tweaked engineering.

Partners and Sales Traction

Amazon has signed up more than 80 companies as partners, building up a reseller channel. Most of those partners are very small businesses, and of the 80-plus software partners the author has heard of perhaps half, despite two decades covering the sector. A possible 80:20 dynamic: 80 percent of sales and deployments are done by 20 percent of the companies — mainly larger partners with full-time sales and marketing, established customer bases and clearly defined market verticals. Most of the roughly 80 would be companies whose main value proposition is low cost and simple use, and when scores of them share that pitch, low cost gets pushed toward near-free.

Software companies that integrated the Signage Stick with their SaaS platforms reported very modest sales. Contacts suggest sales that have come in skewed mainly toward the education market, with most users being small end-users with one or a handful of screens. More than 70 CMS providers, for example, try to generate business by offering free trials. A "Featured Partners Of The Month" listing sits at the top of the partner page; the author guesses — only guesses — it comes with a listing fee. Otherwise all 80-plus options look the same, leaving a buyer unfamiliar with the software unable to distinguish, for example, a company like Poppulo with hundreds of staffers in three countries from Posterbooking, which has a handful of people in the UK.

Software Strategy

Whether Amazon sticks with the hardware side or adds software remains open. The financial and ease-of-use case strengthens if buyers use a CMS that ships with the stick rather than sourcing and subscribing to a likely unfamiliar provider. The author's thought was that Amazon could simply buy one of the 80-plus CMS providers, but a contact noted almost all of them would not meet Amazon's hyper-tight security standards. With roughly 50,000 software developers and engineers on its payroll, writing a secure platform to play out files would be achievable — a hill to climb rather than a mountain.

Amazon is not seen as a threat to the top 10 or 20 software options targeting enterprise business with tools tuned to specific needs such as corporate, mass transport, healthcare or large-scale retail. For smaller vendors marketing easy and affordable options for small business and limited-scale projects, what Amazon offers might be great, or might not — time will tell. The author, who has watched the sector for 20-plus years, notes that large companies have entered digital signage before and quietly exited, and that in giant companies the segment tends to be a small unit with limited executive support; Amazon, however, is not reported to be expanding beyond welcoming software firms into its partner ecosystem and leveraging its sales, warehousing and delivery capabilities.