University of New Hampshire Invests in OrcaTV to Unify Digital Displays, Launch Better Content

Up until 18 months ago, the University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) digital signage had a big problem – it had too many system “flavors.”

UNH’s large campus has multiple disparate locations that feature flat panels and cable T.Vs as its digital signage, and multiple solution providers tying to each other to display content on campus.

The university needed a solution that unified its digital signage to display different flavors of content, rather than different flavors of systems.

That solution was OrcaTV, a content centralization platform.

Marshall White says the interest in OrcaTV sparked at an EDUCAUSE-sponsored tradeshow, where he met OrcaTV creator and CEO Rajiv Shenoy.

White, Manager of Classroom/Customer Service Support Group at UNH, says Shenoy explained how UNH’s problem was common in higher education, and that OrcaTV could centralize the campus’s flavors under one solution.

“All of a sudden, I didn’t feel like I was alone, which was great,” White says. “I started to realized that OrcaTV provides IT services to stitch together all of your different platforms. You could have, for instance, some of the common digital signage companies like Visix, Hughes, Tightrope, etc. If you had different groups of those around campus, OrcaTV could be the glue that glues them all together. That was really attractive.”

Since investing in OrcaTV, UNH’s digital signage system improved, and reaped four key benefits:

1) Increased value of other digital signage products

White says OrcaTV helped UNH receive maximum benefits from its other digital signage products and contracts.

“We weren’t fully realizing all of the potential of the functionality we had paid for in the licensing,” he says. “That was attractive – OrcaTV also said that they could make sure we got the most out of our contract with Visix as well.”

White also says UNH did not have emergency alerts integrated with its digital signage until OrcaTV came around; the emergency alert group was just forming when the digital signage system was being installed.