README FIRST

This is the final early draft of the DeOOH White Paper before the edited version that was released. It’s almost twice as long. Besides a lot of extra words, there may be more detail on some of the concepts, and a less filtered version of what I was thinking at the time. Feel free to wade through this if you are interested, but you may want to read the edited version at DeOOH.org first (especially if you are in a hurry).

Small business owners with restaurants, cafes, stores and shops need all the help they can get growing their communities. Larger businesses too could stand to improve their communications. At Vanten, Better Human Communication has been our mission since we were established in 1998, and we are ready to take it to the next level. We are incorporating blockchain technology to create the world’s first Decentralized Out-of-Home (DeOOH) media.

You’ve seen screens in shops and digital billboards on buildings.  This is referred to as digital signage (DS), and when the signage content includes paid advertising, it is known as Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) media. This white paper will explain why this business sector is ready for disruption and how we have already begun to disrupt it. 

Technology is changing the way we communicate and the pace of change is accelerating. Where that leads us though is not a foregone conclusion. I believe DS/DOOH has an important role to play in bridging the virtual worlds and the physical world we live in, and in the best case would bring more harmony to our lives as we struggle with the gap between those worlds.

Furthermore, this role is also a critical step to realizing the Metaverse, a world where AR/VR/XR and all our various cyberspace worlds will blend seamlessly with our IRL meatspace.

Best of all, we’ve got a fun way for you to participate. Soon we will release a limited edition of our NFT viewers called ScrambleTV as NFT bundles loaded with special perks and a lifetime subscription to ScrambleTV SaaS service. Attach your ScrambleTV player to any screen and display your NFTs, creating your own private gallery, and your own customizable viewport into the Metaverse. At any time, owners of these NFTs can optionally participate in the world’s first DeOOH media, helping to shape the future of decentralized communication.

Whether you join us directly in this project or not,  we are always looking to plant the seeds of our vision, and person by person bring us closer to decentralized world where communication works for people and makes lives better.

Table Of Contents

  1. Some quick housekeeping notes
  2. Blockchain is changing the world
  3. Why media is ripe for disruption
  4. Isn’t the metaverse already here?
  5. Two visions: Cacophony or Endless Story
  6. How it could be: the story of Bob and Alice
  7. How things really are
  8. Barriers to progress
  9. Our Solution: Just in time feature delivery
  10. The offer: Scramble TV NFT Viewer
  11. The Roadmap
  12. Summary
  13. Footnotes & Citations

1. Some quick housekeeping notes

Not an investment or securities offering

The purpose of this white paper is to outline our unique industry perspective and offer participation in a project through a one-time purchase of an NFT token representing a bundled service package. It is not an investment or securities offering.

A note about POV

Much of this white paper relates personal industry experience that is largely Japan based. I’ve engaged with industry players from around the world since the beginning and yes, different markets have played out and continue to play out quite differently from Japan. However, regardless of whether this market or that is a year or two ahead in AdTech, Programmic DOOH or whatever, I believe the broad strokes of my arguments apply globally. There is no DOOH market yet, that has completed a shift to the new paradigm of what DOOH aspires to, let alone DeOOH.

2. Blockchain is changing the world

Blockchain is changing the world starting with finance (DeFi),  and lately moving into art and collectibles (NFTs). We can expect this trend to continue, bringing the advantages of blockchain (decentralization, efficiency, accountability, immutability, security, and transparency) into all areas of our lives that are over-regulated and centralized, controlled by a few powerful players, and rife with the inefficiencies of archaic value/supply chains. 

At its heart decentralized computing is about giving back control to people over their transactions, data, privacy, identity, hopefully as a step to better quality of life, and freeing up more time and energy to make the world a better place.

3. Why media is ripe for disruption

Media is another area typically controlled by a few strong players, often with some level of ultimate control by the government either directly or through regulation. 

The Internet in many ways has already disrupted and democratized media. Anybody can make a website, a YouTube channel, a podcast, or grow a following on social media channels: Twitter, YouTube, Instagram TikTok. There is so much going on and the landscape evolves so quickly, it might seem the future is already here.

However, when you look closely you see that the rise of a few large tech companies has in many ways left us with less privacy, less control over our identity and information. There is still plenty of room for decentralization to bring us a better future. To be sure, there is great work being done in this area already – Brave for example with their Brave browser and BAT token [1].

The term media is also very broad, with broadcast TV, cable TV and now streaming networks; newspapers, magazines, and so much more.

However, I’d like to focus on one particular slice of the media landscape,  specifically OOH or Out-of-Home media.  Traditionally, OOH meant billboards, but these days it also includes everything from large LED screens to in-store digital signage media (DOOH) Although DooH refers to a very specific sub-segment of digital signage – the use of digital out of home media for advertising – I will use the terms DOOH and “digital signage” loosely and somewhat interchangeably on purpose. I believe the future of OOH, that has already started to change with the internet, and digital signage will be taken to its logical conclusion with the integration of blockchain technology and will no longer be recognizable in its current form. In this white paper, we will refer to this new approach as DeOOH (Decentralized OOH). 

Furthermore, I will argue that DS/DOOH/DeOOH is a missing piece and critical step on the path to the metaverse, the future where our digital and non-digital lives seamlessly merge. While AR/VR continues to evolve and seems poised to become a growing part of our lives, I believe we are skipping a fundamental step toward integrating our online / offline lives, one that is critical to ultimately enabling wider adoption of AR/VR. I’d like to assert that DS/DOOH has a critical role to play here.

4. Isn’t the Metaverse already here?

Everywhere you look people are buried in their devices. At home, millions of people are immersed in games and experiences from Minecraft to Fortnite (using web2 apps), and more recently from Decentraland to Cryptovoxels (using web3 dapps). 

Doesn’t that mean the metaverse is already here for those brave enough or young enough to enter?

Well, let me ask you this.

Why is it that we can still regularly go into a restaurant, shop, office or factory and view a scene that would not be out of place 50 years ago or more?

Try this next time you are at a restaurant for example. Mentally take a picture from where you are. If you manage to avoid including people who are looking at their devices or era-specific fashion hints, chances are you could add a retro filter to your scene and easily get away with saying it was taken 20, 30, even 50 years ago or more. Paper menus, paper posters on the wall, or maybe even that 19th century media so widely used for “daily specials” – a blackboard and chalk.

Nine out of ten cafes, restaurants, bars, shops or brick-n-mortar locations have zero screens on the wall (maybe it’s 7 or 8 out of 10 in your neck of the woods, but my point still stands). Where there are screens you are likely to see them used for one function only. 

For Example:

  • as menu boards in QSR (quick service restaurants)
  • as interior design (video loops of runway models in apparel stores)
  • as way-finding signage in shopping malls (an interactive map and list of tenant shops)
  • as sales promotion (dedicated screens for specific products near point of sale in retail)

This is almost like using your smartphone as a dedicated Facebook viewer… and only having one friend’s posts on your timeline. Obviously, that too would be an example of extremely inefficient communication and a big waste of resources. 

Even worse, most digital signage is stand alone, not connected to the internet. Somebody needs to physically change the media (DVD, BluRay, USB stick or SDcard) to change the content.

This is a further waste of time and resources.

The promise early on was that digital signage would extend the internet into real locations providing people with timely information, giving small businesses a way to advertise in their communities, letting anyone easily get the right content to the right screen at the right time.

As someone who has been trying hard for almost twenty years to make this a reality, I can say unequivocally that the results across the industry have not lived up to this promise.

Suffice it to say, I’ve yet to see DS/DOOH in any country where I could say the following are generally true:

  • There is an even distribution of network connected, digital signs used for communication throughout the community.
  • The messaging time on the media is fairly distributed to all of the stakeholders in the community.
  • Advertising time is also fairly distributed between national advertisers, regional advertisers and local community advertising.
  • The platform is flexible and extensible to allow for new paradigms of usage. (ie: we can do cool stuff with up and coming technology).
  • There is playtime reserved for artists, and again fairly distributed among big names and small, local, regional, and national.

Why is this?

We’ll dive into the reasons for this a little later, but first let me tell you the story of how I glimpsed two visions of the future and ended up with a life mission.

5. Two Visions: Cacophony or Endless Story

In spring 2003 I had already spent 8 years making internet service infrastructure, starting in one of Japan’s first ISPs, then five years in Vanten which included an 18 month hiatus around 2000/2001 as CTO of Neoteny, one of Japan’s first start-up incubators founded by Joi Ito [2]. 

One of the things I realized in my ISP days was that creating service infrastructure that had a real component to it (a modem, STB, signage player, etc) was much different than a straight web service. Also, the typical companies operating service infrastructure in this space tended to be established players more than startups. The rapid launch of web apps and services has evolved into a methodology that lets the market quickly show what will fly or not. Lean, agile, MVP, hype it and see if you get traction is as much about quickly growing a user base as it is about building the actual service. Build the user base and the web app will come (and hopefully monetization too).

Service infrastructure though tends to be about CAPEX, OPEX and ROI from the start and as such is left to the much more conservative approach of traditional players. Progress is much more incremental. Ambitious startups often can not find the follow on financing needed to scale, and their failures are seen as cautions rather than inspirations to pick up where they left off. 

At the time, everything pointed to going all in on web only, but then… who was going to bring innovation to the service infrastructure in Japan. We clearly had a knack for creating seamless service platform solutions that made a better UX for both the companies creating services and the customers using them. It was in this environment that I was looking for a new service that we could create and own, and then I saw Minority Report around the same time that I ran across an emerging space in the U.S. called digital signage (or dynamic signage or digital dynamic signage – they hadn’t quite settled on a name yet), and I knew then what that service would be.

Minority Report [3], the 2002 movie with Tom Cruise, in many ways launched the DS and DOOH industry with its dystopian world where screens always knew who you were. So many industry people around that time were influenced by Minority Report that it became a cliche (and kind of uncool to mention it anymore). Many of them were blown away by the concept of smart signage that could know who you are and speak to you directly – a kind of marketing holy grail.

The privacy implications were shocking of course, but it was clear that bridge had already been crossed as web tracking technology continued to explode. We now have extensive tracking and surveillance happening all around us through the web, mobile and security networks, and actually relatively little of it happening through DOOH networks.

It turns out that it’s not really necessary for public screens to talk directly to us. We can be reached (and tracked) quite easily through our devices. While many of my industry colleagues around the world focused on the vision of 1-to-1 consumer interaction with DOOH, I saw a different challenge – how to build the infrastructure to do anything interesting at all with digital signage. It came to me as a glimpse of two futures that I call Cacophony and Endless Story [4]. In both futures, screens are nearly everywhere we go, but that is where the similarities end. 

Cacophony is a world immersed in noise, with different messages being blasted from all directions, each one desperately  trying to stand out and grab our attention. The screens are all run independently on a mishmash of systems, tiny silos of media with no coordination at all. Needless to say this world would be exhausting and unpleasant, and the communication incredibly inefficient. 

Endless Story is much calmer. There are just as many screens but the content is loosely coordinated in a way that piques your interest. Rather than an assault on your senses, content shifts slightly as you move around forming stories that draw you in. Art is there too and games. In fact, most branding supports artistic content or some game-like engagement. Old style Ads are crass, and the equivalent of standing up in crowded room and screaming how great you are – not the best way to make friends. One to one conversations still take place, but we have our devices for that and there is continuity across the conversations on the screens and on our devices. 

I thought about these two visions and which corporation exactly could I count on to bring us the software infrastructure / platform that would enable Endless Stories. 

I couldn’t think of one… and that was it. I was hooked.

Within days we had the design for a cloud based service that would let customers easily add or change content from their phones, would use rule-based scheduling to get the right content in the right place at the right time, would support a point based ecosystem where viewers could participate and get rewarded for engagement, locations could get rewarded for publishing content, and in turn publish their own content in the local community. 

By 2005, we were installed in a sports bar in Shibuya. Our platform was single source, multi-tenant SaaS, though cloud or SaaS were not words in common use yet. The scheduling was rule-based, though we were still in the AI winter, years before the neural network boom. Our platform could easily integrate with any external sensors or data years before the buzz about IoT and Smart Cities. Content could be easily changed from a phone using imode – a feature to access internet years before smart phones existed when Japan briefly ruled the mobile world. QR codes let viewers interact and take the conversation to their phones. 

The point system looked tricky and was left for a later phase (I had no idea that blockchain and tokens were on the horizon, even though I had been sitting through complicated explanations of hashing timestamps with Merkle trees at Neoteny by one of our entrepreneurs in residence who would later go on to found what was arguably the first blockchain company to go public).

Our early foray into location based digital media for small businesses ended quickly though, 

because… well… 

People weren’t ready for this yet. 

The folks in the Sports Bar were doing plenty of cool stuff with their phones, but the concept of using their phones to change menu specials on the TV was just too out there. 

We quickly pivoted and spent the next ten years delivering DS / DOOH solutions for big companies.

Fast forward to now and where are we?

Many of the pieces have fallen into place that make the Endless Story scenario within our grasp, but at the same time we seemed to have moved closer than every to Cacophony.

6. How it could be: the story of Bob & Alice

So what would the world of Endless Story be like? 

Picture this.

Bob  runs a small restaurant.  He’s a great cook and very welcoming to regulars and newcomers alike. He is not an expert marketer, graphic designer or social media whizz.  Alice is a freelance graphic designer with a knack for web marketing. She lives nearby and joined Adopt-A-Shop which lets marketing and design professionals support local community businesses as a hobby / side-gig, paid with crypto-tokens tied to the community media. Bob’s restaurant has a couple of screens that are part of this media.  

The one social media that Bob had managed to post on consistently was Instagram. Now his screen automatically shows the 10 most recent instagram posts nicely formatted for the screen and mixed in with other content. Instead of the old piece of paper taped to the cash register that said “follow us on Instagram”, customers can experience the fun vibe Bob has going on his Insta channel, and they are way more likely to follow and join in.

Bob gets a trickle of tokens from advertisers when he let’s Ads run in his restaurant (national, regional and local ads), he gets some more tokens from the town for showing community content (community news & announcements, local school art, etc), and another trickle of tokens for allowing various other content on his screens. He subscribes to a bunch of art channels that match his tastes and the decor of his shop – retro punk art. The subscriptions are free and the channels also show NFTs that are available to purchase right there, and Bob gets a commission on the sales. 

He also likes to show a new kind of interactive game that comes on the screen for a minute a few times an hour. This is DeOOH based social gaming. A bunch of people perk up and grab their phones for a few seconds when it comes around. They laugh and talk to each other then go back to what they were doing. It’s funny to think that something called social gaming used to mean obsessively staring at one’s own device oblivious to all surrounding people, then spamming your friends to join and play alone too.

Alice designs Bob’s menus and event announcements, getting paid in tokens and a free meal at least once or twice a week. Alice and Bob have become friends, so Alice feels like she has a stake in his success. When she is in the shop they discuss ways to make the content better or come up with new event ideas. This makes Alice a bit of a star in the shop. She is also developing her portfolio as a digital artist. She has a regular showing of her NFT gallery on Bob’s screens and not only is this one of her best sales locations, its also where her nearby fans like to congregate. Bob feels like he has a stake in the growth of Alice’s art career, he certainly bought a fair number of her NFTs himself (with his tokens). 

Lately Alice is helping Bob with his web and social media too, getting it all to tie in better with the screen in his restaurant. which acts like a window to the online world. The regulars all pay attention to the changes in content on the screen as it’s one of the community’s go to informations spots. It also acts as a reminder for the online touch points.

Most importantly, it’s the gateway for new customers to enter the community.

It’s a push media, but non-obtrusive. You can look at it or ignore as you like. 

This is where the back story gets told… 

Who are the people running this place? (Bob, the retro-punk surfer)

What do they care about?  (punk music and art, surfing, and good food)

What is special about this place and its services or products? (all ingredients locally sourced – videos on the screens introduce you to the growers, who are… you guessed, part of the community)

How can I be part of the community? (you watched the screens for 30 minutes… if you like what you saw, you’re in).

7. How Things Really Are

Typically restaurants and small businesses have no screens providing on location information for their communities. Instead you will see posters and other traditional signage including blackboards, which have been around since the 1800s. 

Menus are often laminated plastic or high quality printed booklets, so they are not easily changed or reprinted. The specials might be printed daily on paper and as well on a whiteboard or blackboard.

Sometimes there is a TV running to give customers something to look at, though the complete lack of relevance (and sound volume) means that customers are typically buried in their own devices instead.  

In the case of Bob’s restaurant above, a TV wouldn’t show any information about his restaurant or his community of regulars and fans. It wouldn’t compensate him in any way for the Ad revenue that is generated by the eyeballs in his shop. Nor would he have any control over the media except to turn it off or change the channel.

It’s ironic that we can find “Follow us on Instagram” written on a blackboard in this day and age, but it’s even more surprising to me, just how normalized that is. Just as this photo below of a horse towing a car would have seemed completely normal 100 years ago, before we had tow trucks, our lack of coordinated communication infrastructure that will enable the metaverse is not glaringly obvious to most people because… well… it’s not here yet.

8. The Market and Barriers to Progress

The great news about DS/DOOH in 2021 is that it is seemingly everywhere. DS is a standard feature of all new buildings and shopping malls. The DS / DOOH markets have grown steadily over the last 20 years and are now US$ 21.49 B [5] and $41.06 B [6] respectively as of 2020 and poised to continue growing [cite]. This growth looks impressive until you compare it to Web and Mobile advertising markets, both of which have grown substantially more in the same time.  DeFi/Web3 Dapps too are moving much more money around than all of DOOH despite arriving much later and only now edging in to mainstream adoption.

Let’s look closer at some of the issues holding back the industry.

First of all the percentage of standalone digital signage is still extremely high. Some estimates place it at 60 – 70% or even higher. In this scenario, you have digital content on a screen, but the source is an external media such as DVD, Blu-ray, USB memory stick or SDcard. This is the digital version of a VHS player attached to an old TV set. Better resolution maybe, but same manual hassle to update content, no dynamic content of any kind, no analytics and no way to use software to add efficiency to the workflow. You would think that DOOH at least would be all networked, but even there you will find a surprising number of media around the world relying on a sneaker net, people running around to screens updating content on a weekly or monthly basis.

Things look only slightly better when you examine the software used for managing networked DS and DOOH. The earliest DS software was created as a way to show the text information screen on cable channels, and by display makers wanting to run a simple loop of digital content.  The assumption was that a local content server on the network would serve only a few players, typically running a loop of identical content.  Even as the number of players, scheduling, effects and transitions increased, the architecture was still the same. Today, every network of screens is typically controlled by a centralized server. It is very difficult to delegate partial control of screen time to people in the network, let alone with people outside the network, or to allow exchange of content between networks. This heavily centralized control means that arcane manual processes are used to submit content to the network, and manage the operations of the network.

Why is this? 

Here are some of the reasons:

  • CAPEX requirements make it difficult for startups to enter and succeed. Mentioned earlier, this is a big barrier. To get past this you need people skilled at raising money.  A good looking business plan has everything figured out – what the Ads are going to sell for, how many Ad slots there will be, what content will fill up the dead time, how many people are going to be within the vicinity. This leaves little flexibility to test and respond to the actual market needs.
  • Established OOH companies took a very conservative approach to DOOH, staying heavily focused on analog until quite recently. Even as DOOH media increases, in many cases it’s literally the digital version of its OOH counterpart. For example, many posters in Japanese train stations were replaced with displays showing exactly one Ad for a week at a time. Paper has been replaced by a video, but the sales channels, the way the media is priced and sold, remains exactly the same. In other words the media was designed to fit the existing sales eco-system, instead of rethinking what is possible with the new technology.
  • Heavily regulated and/or controlled by a few big companies. Governments tend to want control over media to various degrees, and even in deregulated markets control by a few large players is common. Media works best at scale and CAPEX keeps the barrier there when regulation doesn’t.
  • Barriers to innovation create de facto standards. When you combine a high CAPEX, conservative companies, and inertia to keep the sales channels, catalog, pricing model the same, then it’s not surprising that we end up with a digital copy of an analog process, and before long it becomes a de facto standard, and even harder to change.
  • Inefficient deployment and operations drive up costs / pricing. Big, conservative companies often over-think, over-engineer, and over-staff their media deployments. If the CAPEX / OPEX are high, then you need high priced Ads and more of them to break even, reducing the opportunity for community content or other content that would be of interest to viewers.
  • Niche market for suppliers. While thousands of locations can become a sizable OOH media, thousands of units is not very interesting to hardware and software makers. The DOOH sector has been an after thought for everything from professional displays to player hardware, keeping prices high and options limited. Most of the innovation has been led by other sectors – high end graphics from gaming, cheap powerful android devices from smart phones.
  • Poor metrics and analytics. One of the reasons web and mobile have leaped ahead of DOOH is the poor metrics and analytics for OOH. OOH has traditionally audited locations by counting the people and cars in the vicinity and deriving an average number of potential viewers that might be nearby. Advertisers would like to know who is looking and who is buying because of what they saw. Web and Mobile are killing this, and now track people all over the web for better or worse. The technology has been around for a while to get decent aggregate numbers that could provide useful analytics. Uptake has been very slow because of the conservative nature of the sector (we got by fine without data until now) and often because the real numbers of people looking were not going to be anywhere near the previous big numbers of potential viewers.
  • Boring media. Most OOH media use a pure Ad model which means as much of the media as possible needs to be Ads to increase the ROI. Other content is typically kept to a minimum since it is an expense, though you might see a bit of news and weather with the hope that it attracts some more eyeballs. Needless to say, these media are boring.
  • Content death spiral. High CAPEX / OPEX means higher Ad prices. This combined with poor metrics makes the media hard to sell. Poor revenue means belt tightening. The first thing to go is any interesting content since it was just an expense anyway. Fewer Ads ands less content means fewer viewers. Once this cycle starts the media is usually doomed.
  • Industry myopia is another barrier. People are often more concerned about how things have always been done, rather than what is possible. This applies to people up and down the OOH value chain, which makes it very difficult to have discussions about how to innovate, let alone shift paradigms, or worse, disrupt the entire industry.
  • Convoluted AdTech value chain. This is another big barrier to innovation. Say a customer wants to do a cool OOH campaign. They talk to their Ad Rep who gets a planner on it. The planner comes up with some wild ideas then needs to work with the media buyer to buy some media. The buyer works through media wholesale networks to sell spots. They are not keen to complicate the conversation with innovative ideas that are not covered in their rate card. Even a media owner that wants to do something different will also be stuck talking to the media wholesaler. They will have no access to the media planner with the cool ideas. Sure the stars align sometimes and something cool gets done, but it’s usually a small agency working with one location, using the event to create a video that will hopefully go viral on YouTube and win them an award. So how do you get lots of media to upgrade their capability to be able to handle new kinds of innovative campaigns in the future, and let the planners out there know what is possible so they can dream up even cooler stuff? It’s not easy.
  • Misconception that screens = signage. End of Story.  Need some DS, just get a screen, monitor, TV, projector, LED screen, whatever.  Content can come from a TV tuner, VJ software on your MacBook, a loop of videos on DVD or USB memory stick, or a digital signage player or whatever. There is a tendency by some people to focus on the display technology and assume that the signage player and/or software is not that important. Most people have bigger priorities than worrying about a better way to get content on their screens. 

Now I know that lots of cool stuff gets done anyways. And for everyone of those points above there are dozens of great startups out there doing what they can to make an end run around the challenges. The big companies as well pull off an interesting campaign from time to time. All the while, times change, trends change, technology advances, but my point is that it is incredibly hard to change DOOH at the infrastructure level. 

9. Our solution

Our team has over 25 years of making internet service infrastructure that has that messy real-piece-of-hardware aspect to it, not just working with Web2 or Web3 applications. This means in the trenches experience simplifying technology to the level that your grandmother can use it – literally [7]. We think we know how to fit all the moving pieces together in a way that will shift communication with screens to a new paradigm, and get people using it, liking it, and benefitting from it – whether they are into crypto or not.

There are two key ways to launch an innovative new product successfully:

1) Solve a significant pain point for sizable number of people (must have a clearly identifiable need and a significant potential market).

2) Create hype around a perceived need or pain point, then deliver a solution with low barrier to adoption for users.

Obviously, marketing will help speed up adoption in either case and making the difference between success or failure of any product. I would argue however, that timing – specifically people being ready to buy into the concept – is the biggest make or break factor.

What do you do when there is neither a clear need nor specific pain point, and the market is not there yet either in size or timing? This is the twilight zone where so many innovations languish and die.

We struggled with this for years and believe we’ve come up with a third approach that can work. I call it the piggy back method or just in time features. 

Here’s how it works.

When we meet new customers looking for digital signage, they are typically focused on how many screens they are going to buy. The software to deliver content is an afterthought. We try and let them know it’s an important consideration, but if we go too deep into explaining decentralized management of the content distribution, rule-based scheduling and the grand scheme of how we will enable communications infrastructure for the future, then their eyes glaze over and we’ve lost them to the very next vendor who says they are “cheap” and/or “easy-to-use”.

Instead, we focused on how to deliver the easiest possible user experience of DS at a competitive price point. We didn’t sacrifice our long-term vision at all, but we neatly tucked away all of those features that someone brand new to DS would not be using. This approach has enabled us go up against much larger companies and consistently win contracts with Blue Chip companies. We listen to what they say they want to do and pre-configure their system (a process which takes just a few minutes) to do it efficiently, nothing more, nothing less.

Once the project is deployed, the customer’s paradigm naturally starts to shift. By staying in touch we can introduce new features as they’re needed. We often give a workshop early in the customer relationship, which gives the broad strokes of how to think about building a media with DS and plants the seeds of what is possible, but encourages them to start simply. Months later they remember concepts from the workshop, which make sense to them now that they have some hands-on experience, and they begin to work their way up the sophistication curve.

We have been gradually refining this process and are ready to move much of the onboarding and education to online modules. We think it’s also the perfect time to add Web3 capability to our product in the form of an NFT Viewer as we get to work on the heavy lifting of integrating blockchain into our platform.

In the next section we will outline our offer and how you can join it, but suffice it to say, we will continue to use our tried and true approach to supporting customers. The NFT viewer will be a great NFT viewer (oh and BTW it’s a full featured digital signage player in case you want to mix in other content, add curated streams of crypto or other content, participate in the world’s first DeOOH media, etc). Our signage offering will still be our signage offering (oh and BTW, if you want to show some content straight off of the blockchain or use a wallet for a secure Web3 login, yes we have that now).

This project will help us speed up our dev roadmap to bring better communications technology to more people, ease some of them into using blockchain technology, and bring us all one step closer to the real metaverse.

Imagine a scenario where small businesses (restaurants, hair stylists) can use DeOOH in their community, exchanging services, content and Ads for tokens to build their own loyal fan base, and reducing their reliance on Big Tech and centralized Ad schemes that skim off most of the profit in turn for bringing in that steady stream of new customers. 

Just like with DeFi, DeOOH gives individuals more control over their life, and more opportunity to get directly compensated where they bring value, and ultimately helps them build their community around their location and services through this empowerment.

10. The offer: Limited Edition NFT Viewer Bundle

We are offering a limited-edition value-packed bundle tied to an NFT. You will end up owning the best NFT viewer on the planet with a life-time (yes, really) service subscription, other ongoing perks and benefits, and exclusive membership in a community where you will enjoy either a ringside view or full participation (your choice) in what will be the early days of DeOOH.  If you change your mind later, you can always sell the NFT.

At the core of the package is a professional digital signage player with a perpetual SaaS service license that includes Vanten’s new NFT viewer module and related features including special content channels. The perpetual service also includes a hardware warranty that includes replacement for as long the service continues. Ownership of the NFT will also designate membership in a special community that will help chart the course of DeOOH ideally through a DAO, and receive ongoing recognition and benefits as founding member of this community.

The NFTs are transferable (details in appendix), but are not intended to be used as a speculative investment. The primary value of this package is intended to be the player and service license, and participation in the community.

By participating in this project, you will receive an NFT Token that enables you to the following:

  • 1 Scramble TV NFT viewer that can be attached to any display to create your own personal NFT gallery
  • lifetime subscription and lifetime hardware warranty for the Scramble TV NFT viewer and SaaS service.
  • Charter member status in the Scramble TV community and all associated perks
  • Inclusion on the Scramble TV Wall of Fame as a charter member of our community
  • Your viewer is automatically eligible to opt-in as a node in the first ever world-wide Crypto DeOOH media.

The NFT viewer will arrive within 2 – 4 weeks and is usable immediately. Connect it to a TV, monitor, projector or large format screen and instantly create your own NFT Gallery. 

Once enough (a few hundred?) players have shipped, we will start up the Crypto DeOOH media. There will be a discord discussion channel to enable feedback as we plot the course, and eventually we hope to move this to a DAO run by the community members.

There will only ever be a maximum of 2,000 of these charter member NFT bundles minted. There will be extra benefits for earlier purchases as well as additional stretch goal benefits that apply to all NFT bundle owners as certain milestones are reached. 

For full offer details see http://scramble.media/scrambletv/

11. Future roadmap: DeOOH media and token offering

This project will enable us to speed up our development roadmap and the integration of blockchain technology into our platform and service offerings.

As part of this roadmap, we will launch two proof-of-concept DeOOH media, one very crypto, and one not as much… at first. 

All token holders of the limited edition Scramble TV NFT Viewer bundle, will be able to opt-in as a node in the world’s first DeOOH media. There are few directions we could take this, so we will do some surveys of token owners and discuss on the community discord channel after the initial sale of tokens is complete. This will be completely optional and you can drop in and out as you like. We should have content available to opt-in to shortly after you receive your player.

The second media will be a community DeOOH Proof-of-concept, along the lines of the Bob & Alice scenario outlined in this white paper. This will take longer to get up and running, tentatively scheduled for 1 to 2 years.

Here are some of the goals for the project as it applies to various stakeholders.

For Small businesses:

  • use digital media on location effectively without needing to master the technology.
  • find content creators that can help with quick, simple, cheap content without needing to become an expert in digital content.
  • advertise locally in the community in a cost-effective and efficient way without needing to become an expert in digital marketing.
  • benefit from advertisements on location while maintaining some control over what gets shown.
  • build a community of fans to lessen the effect of ups and downs from external factors (pandemics, etc) leading to a more stable business, increased quality of life, and more time to do what really matters.

For creators:

  • Use your craft to support your community and get paid for it.
  • Learn how to build a content business and/or art business both in and beyond the community depending on your personal ambitions.

For advertisers:

  • Access viewers and engage them in their community.
  • Support the community through your advertising (a very good ESG fit)

As this roadmap gets executed, we will put together a token offering and a plan to scale the project globally. Charter token holders will get preferred access to any future opportunities.

12. Summary

How fast will the shift to DeOOH happen. I have no idea. I started in 2003 thinking we were maybe 5 years from having eInk displays printed cheaply and being used everywhere. We rushed to make the first truly rule-based SaaS digital signage platform so that we wouldn’t miss out. 

Almost 20 years later, we still see bulky displays and primitive software running most digital signage.  Still, we have seen an entire DS/DOOH industry emerge. We have also seen decentralized finance come into view and smart cities lingering on the horizon. It is only a matter of time before these all converge and the need for more sophisticated communications infrastructure becomes glaringly real.

You might say we were waiting for blockchain all along. I’ve been trying to explain to customers for over 8 years how a decentralized view of their digital signage network completely changes everything: getting rid of the centralized bottlenecks (both systems and people) that prevent true scaling, lowering the overhead by pushing out content management to the actual stakeholders, and enabling brand new business models.

We’re excited about ushering in a new world where small businesses (cafes, restaurants, hair stylists for example) can use DeOOH in their community, exchanging services, content and Ads for tokens to build their own loyal fan base. At the same time they can reduce their reliance on Big Tech and centralized Ad schemes that skim most of the profit in exchange for bringing in that steady stream of new customers – what seems like a good deal at first later feels more like being trapped in one vendors ecosystem.

Just like with DeFi, DeOOH gives individuals more control over their roles, and more opportunity to get directly compensated where they bring value, and ultimately helps them build their community around their location and services through this empowerment.

At Vanten, I think we’ve already made as much progress as anyone on the planet in enabling this future, but we’d like to take it to the next level and work with a community of like-minded people eager to see blockchain expand into a wider swath of society, bringing the benefit of DeOOH to communities and businesses around the world.

Footnotes and citations:

  1. Brave’s Basic Attention Token web site: https://basicattentiontoken.org
  2. Neoteny launches: https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2000/03/01/neoteny-the-vcs.html
  3. Minority Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)
  4. Wireless Japan 2009 conference presentation (July 27, 2009) Cacophony vs Endless Story vision of future at 6:02 in video. (Japanese) https://youtu.be/HVuaCAjh8gY
  5. Grandview Research: Digital signage global market was USD 21.49 billion in 2020, expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% from 2021 to 2028. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/digital-signage-market
  6. Research & Markets: DOOH global market was US$ 41.06 Billion in 2020. Expected to reach a value of US$ 50.42 Billion by 2026 (CAGR of 3.58% during 2021-2026). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-digital-ooh-advertising-market-2021-to-2026—industry-trends-share-size-growth-opportunity-and-forecasts-301268981.html
  7. Decentralized town media in Yamagata Prefecture village with population under 300. Vanten setup this media with partner domani in 2016 and it is still running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bZP0bFsG2k&cc_load_policy=1 (Japanese with English subtitles available)