AMX has recently released a Total Cost of Ownership Calculator for digital signage comparing two different setups by taking into account the following parameters:
Digital Signage Requirements:
- Number of Players
- Hours per Day
- Days per Week
- Weeks per Year
- Expected life in years
- US State Deployed (For electricity rates)
Cost of Development for 2 products:
- Media Player Cost Per Unit
- Initial Software Cost
- Initial Subscription Fee
- Monthly Subscription Fee
Energy Efficiency:
- Player Power Consumption in Watts
Hardware Design:
- Type of storage: Solid State / Hard Disk
- Fan: With or Without
The result of the calculation will show you the total cost in a graph, with the lifetime electricity cost, total subscription cost, total software cost and total player cost.
If you purchased the players and plan to manage the devices by yourself, you won’t have to pay any subscription fees. However, you’ll still have to consider the maintenance costs. In that case you may use the “Monthly Subscription Fee” field to estimate the monthly maintenance cost per device. In the example above, we used 20 digital signage players costing 250 USD, used every day 18 hours a day for 10 years and with 10 USD maintenance fee per month and per device. Embedded digital signage players usually run fine with with 2A / 12V power supplies so we considered a worst case scenario of 24 W consumption.
The results will also show you a graph with the CO2 emissions for the 2 products.
The “hardware design” field are not really used to calculate the TCO, but they are also important since hard disk are less reliable than solid state drive and players with fan usually produce more heat and components failure might be more likely. Fans may also generate noise as they wear out over time.
Here’s the link to the calculator: http://www.thinkinspiredsignage.com/DigitalSignageTCOCalulator/
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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