According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, by 2011 the North American market for large flat panel displays for signs will be worth more than US$3.5 billion.

Today, the market is a respectable US$800 million. Or as research firm Display Search reports, 433,000 displays were sold just for signage as of last year.

That report also notes solution providers are selling between one to 50 displays per location with an average of four per site.

The top manufacturers are NEC Display Solutions, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Mitsubishi, Sony, Sharp and the 50 plus other vendors who have seriously overcrowded this space.

The challenge for solution providers in this burgeoning market is that digital signage is not a transactional sale: it is a solution sale. That means a successful VAR needs to have expertise, some smarts and installation know-how.

Retailers over VARs
Currently the market is being served by retailers. According to a Gartner Group study, 28 per cent of IT retailers in North America are providing flat panel displays for digital signage this year. Gartner expects that number to increase to 33 per cent next year.

Solution providers "are graduating beyond the display," said Doug Albregts, vice-president of sales and marketing for NEC Display Solutions, based in Itasca, Ill.

Albregts said solution providers are realizing that they need to talk beyond the panel itself and provide wireless cable, mounts and software to deliver a whole solution rather than a product.

"Customers have a keen interest in digital signage and public information display solutions," Albregts said.

However, NEC is only dealing with 40 partners, which it helps to facilitate customer solutions. Albregts said the company could easily do more because the market is growing. Display Search estimates that the digital signage market will have a need for more than 900,000 displays by 2009.

Digital signage applications work, according to a recent InfoTrends study that polled consumers. The study found that digital signs have a 47.7 per cent effectiveness on brand awareness, increase the average purchase amount by 29.5 per cent, create a 31.8 per cent upswing in overall sales volumes, generate a 32.8 per cent growth in repeat buyers and pull in 32.8 per cent more store traffic.