Great article from Troy Janish last week at Social Meteor.  He advocates using Powerpoint and exporting to JPG files for a standard photo frame or exporting to DVD for an LCD TV + DVD player solution.  He even has a list of tools for converting your PowerPoint presentation to DVD (EM PowerPoint Converter and others). 

One additional point is that if you are running Keynote on a Mac, you should be able to natively burn a DVD of your presentation.  You can also create an iPhoto slide-show and burn that to DVD as well.

The only drawbacks of this PowerPoint sign approach are:

  • Signs can only be updated through a multi-step process (imagine finding a typo and then having to edit the PowerPoint, convert to DVD, burn the DVD, and then swap the DVD into the player).
  • There is no possibility for adding video to the signs.
  • Digital photo frames are still on the small side… probably too small for anything but a countertop display.
  • There are no analytics about the number of time each slide is displayed.

Bottomline: this is a terrific way to get started at the very low end of the market.  You can build a small business digital sign for less than $100 (for the photo frame) and use software that you already understand and probably own. 

But, if you’re wanting to take you cheap digital sign to the next level, you should look at some low end SAAS providers.