Replace the oldest player. Do not rip out the estate

In 2016, flight information displays were hijacked at two Vietnamese airports. In 2018, a cyber attack led Bristol Airport to take its passenger-facing flight information displays offline for two days. Kumar Abhinav, a vice-president at the signage security vendor Veratas, cites both in a trade-press opinion piece. He has a vendor's interest in the subject, but the cases are on the record, and the lesson carries well beyond airports.

His central point is that every screen in a signage estate is a computer with a job to do. For resellers, integrators and specifiers, the useful question is therefore not whether a client's screens could be attacked. It is what happens to the estate when one layer fails, and whether that layer can be fixed without replacing hardware that still does its job.

That is where IDS, which supplies displays and offers integration and managed signage, has a practical conversation to start: an estate check that names who owns the software layer, what has been patched and which players are due for replacement. It is a conversation about ownership and upkeep, not a claim that any panel survives a software failure.

Why screens are an awkward risk

Abhinav argues that signage is easy to underestimate. Screens run unattended for years. They put a message in front of an audience instantly. And ownership is split: in his airport example, the operator, airlines, concessionaires, advertisers and integrators all touch the same estate, so nobody quite owns the risk. The pattern will be familiar in retail and hospitality, where the wall, the content, the software and the hardware may each belong to someone different.

He separates two kinds of estate. Some screens are driven by an external media player, which is a full computer, often an ageing one with an operating system that is hard to patch. Others are system-on-chip displays, where trust rests in the manufacturer's firmware. Each needs its own security baseline, he says, and the oldest players should be replaced first. (Our reading covered the opening and closing sections of the piece; we have not relied on the middle.)

The counter-argument

A prospect will say: "One vendor for screens, software and support is simpler. If something goes wrong, I make one call."

That is a fair point, and larger managed-services groups are consolidating around it. Digital Signage Pulse's summary of a report by the trade publication Invidis describes Econocom, a EUR 3 billion managed-services provider, as having bought four ProAV and digital signage specialists in 2025 and now focusing on integration and its European audiovisual operations. (We read only the Pulse summary, not the Invidis original, which is outside our standing source list. The summary says nothing about Econocom's presence in IDS's market.)

Our answer is that one accountable provider and one locked platform are different things. Accountability is about who picks up the phone. Lock-in is about what it costs to leave. The airport cases do not show that a different panel would have stayed up. They show that when the compute layer fails, the screen is what the public sees fail. Someone has to own that layer: patch it, replace the oldest player first, and be the call. A client can have a single point of contact for supply and integration and still decline a stack in which a failure in any one layer becomes a failure of the whole estate.

Openness is not security in itself: players still need patching, and someone still has to own the arrangement.

What a reseller can open with

Four questions put an estate check on a practical footing:

• When were your media players last patched, and who holds the passwords?
• If your CMS vendor stopped trading, which of your screens would still show content?
• Who owns the risk when an agency, an integrator and a landlord all touch the same estate?
• Which screens are operationally critical, and are they kept apart from the ones that carry promotions?

The second question is the revealing one. If a client cannot say who patches the players, who holds the passwords or who owns the risk, that is the job: name an owner, patch what can be patched, and replace the oldest player before quoting a new estate. The case for the hardware is the narrow one. When a layer above the screen fails, the screen is not automatically the thing that has to be replaced. None of the reporting here shows that a particular panel keeps working through a content management failure, so it should not be promised.

Accessibility adds a second pressure on the software layer. One CMS vendor, Carousel, has announced that its platform substantially conforms to WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 Level AA, following testing with the accessibility firm Level Access. The report says WCAG 2.1 AA is mandated under Title II of the US Americans with Disabilities Act for state and local government bodies. That is a vendor claim relayed from a press release, and a US rule; check the position in your own jurisdiction. In our view, software platforms will increasingly be asked for evidence of this kind. If a tender forces a platform change, ask which hardware would have to move with it, and ask before the quote is issued.