SeriousBox narrowcasting application

A screen in a bar is a computer nobody looks after. It has to come back on its own after a power cut, play what it was told to play, and keep doing that for months while the venue gets on with running a bar. Nobody is going to log in to it, and nobody is going to notice it is broken until a customer does.

SeriousBox was that computer. A desktop Java application that pulls its media down, keeps it on local disk, and plays the playlist as a channel on one screen or several. Keeping the media locally is the whole point: a venue’s internet connection is not something to bet a display on.

What the work was

The application itself was built by an outsourced team in Poland. I was the stakeholder on it, and I designed the answers to what customers asked for. That is a different job from writing the code: requests arrived as complaints from venues, in the language of a bar owner, and had to leave as something a team in another country could build without having ever stood in the room.

When I picked it up it had just been released, and it was unstable and full of bugs.

The unglamorous part turned out to matter most. The machine had to survive being switched off at the wall, so AutoIt scripts ran at boot to start the application and dismiss the Java update prompts that would otherwise sit on screen, in a bar, for a fortnight. A narrowcasting system is judged on whether the screen is showing the right thing at eleven on a Saturday night, not on its architecture.

Where it came from, and where it went

In 2009 Next Level offered a web-based narrowcasting product: mostly pictures of the venue, plus SMS options for binding customers to the location. Venues wanted more than that, and what they asked for first was video in the playlist. This application is what delivered it.

SeriousBox later merged with the Splaire digital signage business and has run since 2018 as Opvallen.nl.

The system this belongs to

SeriousBox narrowcasting is a multi-fold system. Across all of it I was responsible for the technical side: design, development and management, including the support material.

• The SeriousBox desktop application, this page.
• A web-based CMS where clients manage the content of their own narrowcast. See the front-end CMS.
• The Target Marketing microsite, a portal for the customers of clients, on location.
• A CRM where colleagues manage client accounts. See the CRM.
• A call-centre CMS used to sell advertising space. See the call-centre CMS.