Alastair Taft, Luna Screens

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The work on the big Future Displays report and then ISE kind of threw me off my weekly podcast routine, but we're back now - with a couple of interviews recorded, and more that are scheduled.

First up is Alastair Taft, a software developer based in Hobart, Tasmania - which for the map-impaired is a big island off the southeast coast of Australia. During COVID, he and another developer came up with a plan to use the windows of shuttered retail as projected surfaces for ads and other messaging.

That business didn't really go anywhere, but the exercise led to them having a solid software stack to play out and manage media - which led to the commercialization and launch of Luna Screens. The company goes to market with this key, minimalist assertion: Really Simple Digital Signage Software.

It's also, at less than $4 a month per device on subscriptions, really inexpensive.

I chatted with Taft about what makes his platform genuinely simple, and how being lean and mean - and making the software bulletproof - makes Luna Screen's business approach workable.

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TRANSCRIPT

Alastair, thank you for joining me. Can you tell listeners what Luna Screens is all about, when it was launched, and the background? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. So we've been building Luna Screens for probably quite a while, probably about the last four years or so, but we only really started selling it about a year ago and what it is a really simple digital signage platform, that sums it up. 

Why did you do this and why four years ago? You mentioned “we” so I assume there are other people involved. What was the thinking behind doing this? 

Alastair Taft: Originally, it was a couple of us building it, a very small team. And originally it was something different, back during that great time around 2020. 

We had this crazy idea where there was lots of closed down shops and shopping centers and if you walk through any of them they were dead and it didn't look too good, so we had this crazy idea where we would set up projectors in all these shops and put this photographic film on the windows project, either artwork or advertising, so we built all this software to do all that and it didn't go anywhere.

It turns out we've actually built a pretty good digital signage solution here, so let's pivot a little bit. In reality, what we have now is a complete rewrite. It wasn't that much of an overlap, but that's how we ended up here. 

You're a software developer by trade?

Alastair Taft: Yeah, I've built quite a few things, mainly working for startups. So I've got quite a lot of experience building tech, getting lots of startups off the ground. 

Yeah. I think I saw on your LinkedIn page that you're a full stack JavaScript developer, which I know what that means, but not totally.

Alastair Taft: Yeah. It's just basically front end, back end, and everything involved in JavaScript. It's pretty ubiquitous. 

You're in Tasmania, and it's only 7 in the morning there, so you're given a pass on being too fluid with your talking; you haven't had your coffee yet.

Alastair Taft: That's true. 

When you say it's really simple, I know what simple means, but how do you define that? Because there's any number of digital signage software, CMS platforms out there who insist that they're relentlessly intuitive, easy to use, all those kinds of terms. What is it about yours that validates that assertion? 

Alastair Taft: I know this is probably what a lot of other platforms say too. We do think we are intuitive. When we say simple, that doesn't mean unsophisticated. But if you go on CMS and try it out, it is very simple. There are two things there. There's your screens and then there's your media library, and that's the only two things you have there. So you aren't overloaded with a million different configuration options. It's something you can get up and running quickly. There is a lot you can do, but that's the basic building blocks you get on there, you've got your screens and you've got your media library. And then there's way more powerful things you can do with your different media, with scheduling and playlists and all sorts, but that's the bare bones. 

The yardstick for sort of industrial grade, enterprise grade platforms is scalability that, yes, it can be easy to use, but yes, we can also scale and we have the elast