Screenly Newsletter (July 2018) - An Update From the Screenly Team

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Screenly Newsletter July 2018

In this newsletter

  • “Screenly 101” live training webinar
  • A recap of must-read new posts from our blog
  • A review of recent software updates
  • Recent and upcoming events

“Screenly 101” live training webinar

On July 19th we hosted two successful webinar sessions where gave a live training session on using digital signage with Screenly. From screen set-up to content management and everything in between, there was a lot to learn about Screenly’s solution.

Topics included

  • Screen deployment and management
  • Assets, playlists, and scheduling
  • Managing content, images, videos, and URLs
  • Networking and WiFi setup
  • A live demo with Q&A

If you missed this webinar, don’t worry! We’ll be hosting more of these in the future.

A recap of must-read new posts from our blog

At Screenly, we are making a major push towards content production for the digital signage industry. Our plan is to create regular, helpful, and targeted content so that you and your business can get the most out of your digital signage. In today’s newsletter, we provide a brief recap of our most recent posts that you may find useful for your business.

We hope our recent content is helpful and relevant to your business and its digital signage needs. Follow and keep tabs on our blog, as we’ll be publishing more and more great pieces in the coming months. Also, if there are any burning questions you have in the digital signage space, let us know. We’d be happy to do some research and turn your question into a great post for everyone.

A review of recent software updates

Screenly 2 player recap

Earlier this year, we launched our new digital signage player, Screenly 2. This was a major accomplishment that was over two years in the making. Screenly 2 was a complete re-write from scratch, and one of the areas we particularly focused on in this new player was security. You can read more about this in our blog post here. We are also actively shipping updates to Screenly 2 devices (which are automatically deployed every night).

We should also say that the move to the new player was not entirely without hiccups. Some users unfortunately experienced issues with corruptions (which turned out to be a bug in the operating system), which has since been resolved. To prevent such errors going forward, we have installed new test hardware that you can read more about here. We also encountered a few other bugs, but all-in-all, given the scope and complexity of this roll-out, things have gone well and the feedback from the community has been very positive.

If you do however encounter any issues with the new Screenly 2 Player, please reach out to Screenly support.

Please also note that we will stop supporting Screenly 1 Player early next year. So, if you haven’t upgraded your Screenly Players this year, it’s now time to start migrating your players.

Retrieve the hardware and software version in the cloud interface

Since many users are in the process of migrating their devices to Screenly 2, we received a lot of requests for the ability to remotely detect the hardware and software version of a given device directly in the web interface. We listened, and we added this functionality. Now, when you navigate to a device, you will see the both the hardware version (i.e. what type of Raspberry Pi it is) as well as the software version (i.e. if the device is running Screenly 1 or Screenly 2).

New sign-up/login page

If you’ve logged into your Screenly account in the last month, you’ve likely noticed the new look and feel of the login page. This is part of a bigger effort to overhaul the look and feel of all of our web properties. We’ve started with the login page, but we are now moving on to other areas. The next area we will be giving an overhaul is our website (www.screenly.io), and, later on, we will overhaul the digital signage cloud interface.

Lots of behind-the-scenes changes

In the last few months, we have spent a lot of time and energy on improving our infrastructure. We’ve added a lot of redundancy. This means that an entire data center can fall over, and Screenly will still be working. (This, of course, is in addition to the fact that Screenly players will survive an entire infrastructure outage for days). For the tech-savvy reader, we migrated to Kubernetes last year, and we have kept improving in this domain. Most recently, we greatly improved our security by adopting RBAC and implementing properly locked down containers with automatic vulnerability scanners across all our services.

Recent and upcoming events

This year we’ve teamed up with our friends at the security company Control Plane to speak about IoT security. We kicked this off with our talk “The ‘S’ in IoT stands for Security” at Container Camp Australia in Melbourne earlier this year. The recording from the event is available here.

Next up is Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, Canada on August 29-31, where we will be delivering a similar talk.

We’re likely to do a few more events this year around the globe, so keep an eye open on our social media channels and in future newsletters if you want to catch us.

Picture of Viktor Petersson
Viktor Petersson View Profile
CEO and Co-founder of Screenly. Viktor loves taking ideas and turning them into products and services. You can frequently find him on the speaking circuit around the globe. He spent a big part of his adult life as a digital nomad. Viktor is also passionate about DevOps and IoT security. You can find Viktor on Twitter under @vpetersson.

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