How To Create 5 Different Playlists For Your LED Screens With One Click

This is another question received from a reader: "I have a question about connection and transmitting. Let's say you have 5 LED boards. Let's say for a sample there are different politicians in different cities and they want to advertise their campaign. Is there a way to advertise each of them, on their city's LED board (all other ads would stay the same on all LED boards). Thanks for all your help!"

This is a great question because it denotes a particular attention to the usability (that in my opinion is at least as important as the LED screen features as brightness, image quality etc...).

Before answering, let me explain one thing: most LED screens are provided with a proprietary scheduling software that you can use to create the playlist of all the commercials.

Important: some of these software are not mandatory (ie. you are not obliged to use the software to schedule your ads. You can use any software available on the market if you have any other preference) but others are (ie. you can not use any other software but the one you were provided with the LED screen).

Of course, the latter option is much more limiting, so when choosing your giant screen, make sure you ask whether the scheduling software can be replaced by another program that you might prefer.

Ok, back to the question: Yes there is a way to show 5 different political ads on 5 different screens that run the same playlist. And it is pretty simple too. In the past I described how the scheduling software works and how you can easily create the playlist of your advertisers. In order to broadcast the same playlist on all the LED displays, but with one single ad different for each city, you can do the following:

First of all, create a generic movie called something like "Political-Ad.avi". You will only use for setting up the playlist with the exact date/time of broadcasting. Then create the playlist that will be broadcasted on all the LED Screens. For each commercial, decide when you want it to play (ie. only on weekends in the evening or everyday from 10h00 to 15h00).

At this point you should have something that looks like that:

ID Advertiser's Name (broadcast date and time)
1. CocaCola-Ad (sunday+saturday | from 18 to 24)
2. Ford-Ad (everyday | from 0 to 24)
3. Armani-Ad (everyday | from 10 to 15)
4. Political-Ad (everyday | from 0 to 24)
5. Siemens-Ad (monday to friday | from 7 to 12)
6. Bacardi-Ad (friday+saturday | from 18 to 24)

Once you are done with the scheduling, you must simply login on the control PC of each LED screen and replace the generic movie we called "Political-Ad.avi" with the right advertising for the candidate of each city.

NB: you don't have to add another political-ad, you must simply overwrite the generic file with the right one you created in the second moment.