IAdea is a Taiwanese specialist for digital signage hardware and was founded in 2000. In 2008, they became the first company to produce SMIL-based media players on a larger scale.
Our Digital Signage CMS supports all IAdea media players developed since 2010.
IAdea is currently building SMIL-compatible media players based on Android and so-called Signboards.
The media players of the XMP series have a metal chassis and are therefore extremely robust. The current flagship of the XMP series is the 8552. Among other things, it plays 4K videos, comes with 16 GB flash, Wi-Fi, and you can optionally upgrade it with a 4G cellular module via USB.
IAdea also offers various signboards with integrated touch monitors. These are available in screen sizes from 10 to 22 inches (55.88 cm). The signboards are divided into two categories: Room Management and All-In-One.
The IAdea signboards, which are advertised as "Room Management", are also bundled with special software to display room bookings. By the way, this is implemented as a so-called digital signage widget. The linked article highlights how powerful this technology is.
SMIL-compatible media players from IAdea have long availability and long-term support. The devices are low-maintenance and support almost all video formats. There are no moving parts like fans, and they consume significantly less power than PCs.
We are not so interested in the technical features, especially since they are all similar anyway. However, we only list them for completeness. The long-term availability and long-term support are the key criteria for IAdea from our perspective.
Device series from IAdea exist over several years. This stability is important for long-term projects that are built up successively. You want to avoid being faced with new computer hardware after just a few months. Cheap media players are only available for a few months. Then they will replaced by other hardware.
For support, the same applies as for the long-term availability described above. In fact, we are working with IAdea for ten years and are an official partner since 2018. Our customers could still download updates and fix bugs many years after purchase.
There are local distributors in many countries to contact for warranty claims and support. In addition, you can order equipment there without having to deal with the usual customs and import issues (taxes, delays, etc.).
If you connect IAdea players to our CMS, we will provide support ourselves and take care of communication with IAdea in Taiwan in case of failure. From experience, the team there is extremely competent and helpful.
If you are interested in more detailed information about these topics, we recommend this article about cheap digital signage.
Finally, let's move on to the technical advantages:
The devices have no moving parts like fans or hard drives and use efficient ARM processors. Consequently, they are low-maintenance and power-efficient. The MBR-1100, for example, consumed less than 10 watts under full load.
The players support all common video formats and codecs like VP8, h264 and h265 (start from XMP-7300). Furthermore, they also display JPEG/PNG, HTML5 pages with JavaScript, and support digital signage widgets.
Each device has a variety of interfaces such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, HDMI, multiple USB ports, and a battery-buffered real-time clock. Furthermore, they have at least 8 GB of eMMC high-quality flash memory. Of course, you can expand this with an SD or microSD card, depending on the model.
IAdea-Player are shipped ready to use. You just need to connect the devices to the SmilControl CMS. The configuration process is simple. There are two ways to connect IAdea players with our CMS:
IAdea products are more expensive than comparable hardware from various Asian marketplaces. But they are definitely worth it. As mentioned before, we have been working with IAdea products since 2011—before SmilControl was founded. In our experience, they are good, stable running media players. Some of our SaaS customers still run dozens of XMP-330s and XMP-3350s, in some cases for over ten years. From our perspective, we can recommend IAdea devices without reservation. You absolutely don't do anything wrong with them.
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