After Fort Hood, U.S. military turns to digital signage
U.S. Department of Defense orders that military bases need effective real-time communications with their personnel are leading to digital-signage sales for Canadian software maker Capital Networks (CNL) and reseller World Media Net.
World Media Net, a U.S. firm with government certification, has sold CNL’s Audience software to military installations including Scott and Malmstrom Air Force Bases, McConnell Medical Air Force Base, and Fort Eustis, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps.
More than 20 military sites have ordered the system, which allows real-time communication around the base via pre-existing cable channels. It reaches families in on-base housing as well as military personnel going about their duties.
While the need for emergency messaging is a major driver behind the deployments, bases can also add content such as weather and news.
The government told military bases to improve their emergency messaging after a shooting spree killed 13 people and wounded many others at Fort Hood in Texas last November.
A subsequent Department of Defense (DoD) report, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, concluded that “many DoD installations lack mass notification facilities”, even though a departmental instruction at the beginning of the year had already said bases should “develop mass warning and notification capabilities with the ability to warn all personnel within ten minutes of incident notification at the dispatch centre”.
New notification technologies such as contacting personnel via their PC desktops or SMS text messaging “have been put to use at numerous universities since the Virginia Tech mass shooting”, it noted, referring to the April 2007 massacre of 32 people by a gunman at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Digital signage has, however, been relatively rare at military installations.
World Media Net director Robert Wolgamotti – a U.S. Navy veteran – said: “Centralisation is the key to effective and timely emergency messaging. While individual military departments demand their own signage control and programming, emergency messaging must be able to pre-empt or over-ride departmental messages.
“It is for this reason many bases want to standardise on a single digital-signage vendor to synchronise emergency messaging,” he added.
www.capitalnetworks.com
worldmedianet.us.com
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