New Zealand’s Largest Seafood Company Sanford Keeps Employees on Vessels All over the World Informed of Company News Using Digital Signage

How this seafood company controlled remote digital signage for deployed liners across the world.

Sanford is a large and long-established New Zealand seafood company. They are committed to looking after the marine environments in which they operate, to provide customers with top quality, sustainably harvested seafood. They needed a digital signage system that could scale - and that could be implemented easily out on a barge in Stewart Island or in an ocean liner that would be out fishing for six months of the year.

Initial digital signage aims:

• A platform that could leverage multiple different types of content and media from a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure.
• To be able to quickly and effectively share important news, media and events with the entire business.
• To find a system that could work with a satellite connection to a vessel from anywhere in the world

Here, we speak to Liam Bradford, IT Tech Support Engineer at Sanford, on his experience using ScreenCloud and digital signage.

Digital signage journey

We needed a platform where we could leverage multiple different types of content and media from a scalable cloud-based infrastructure. It needed to be able to quickly and effectively share important news, media, and events with our entire business, whether our personnel are floating on a barge in the middle of Big Glory bay in Stewart Island or out in the ocean for months at a time, fishing atlantic toothfish.

We initially tried other digital signage systems, but eventually found ScreenCloud which we believed was going to offer us the best solution for the best price. 

Digital signage used

We have several different types of hardware that we use for our digital signage but mostly we use the Amazon Fire TV stick. One of the initial challenges was that the deep sea fleet remains connected to the internet via a satellite link. This is high bandwidth but also very high latency (two-second round trip) through a laser guided gyroscopic dish that occasionally will disconnect to unwind itself. For this to work, we needed to use an Amazon Fire TV Box and a 32GB SD Card for caching most, if not all, of the content required. This in itself is no mean feat because they don't sell or support them in New Zealand. With the help of the ScreenCloud support team we managed to find the right media players and get them up and running, for a long-term solution. 

Content creation

We do much of our content creation in house with many staff handling the content for their own respective areas and departments.

Results using ScreenCloud

ScreenCloud has helped us to be a lot more proactive with our internal communications because they can be controlled remotely. This makes it easier for our digital signage to be centrally managed, giving us easier deployment across the entire business. It also means that all of our hardware is independent from our content which means no need for backups or any disaster recovery plans.