Charlottetown-based digital signage company ScreenScape Networks has soft-launched its ScreenScape5 initiative, which will offer greater flexibility to users.

A pioneer in digital signage in public spaces, ScreenScape helps businesses and organizations to advertise on location-based TV monitors. It aims to offer an easy-to-use, cost-effective product to present high-quality messaging on flat-screen monitors.

ScreenScape5 won’t increase the cost of the company’s subscription or hardware, said Founder and CEO Mark Hemphill in an interview. It is a better, more-flexible offering for existing and new clients, which allows ScreenScape to better compete against the digital-signage-as-service model.

“It’s one thing to make the system more powerful, but it’s another to make it more elegant,” said Hemphill.

Hemphill told Entrevestor the purpose of upgrade is twofold. The new software removes Adobe flash, a program he says is being phased out of the industry. Hemphill said the redesign was required to remove the soon-to-be-obsolete program, so it was the perfect time to improve the user experience and to make the program easier to use, while keeping all the tools clients need.

The key to the redesign was to make a program that would provide professional and customizable digital signage, requiring little to no design expertise on the part of the client.

“The exercise afforded us the chance to take everything we learned about the industry, and take the enormous amount of feedback we gathered from customers over the years, and also take the best of new and modern software techniques,” said Hemphill. “To do things we couldn’t do 10 years ago.”

ScreenScape5 adds easy design elements, from professionally designed templates to a database of stock photos and videos, which are included in ScreenScape’s subscription free. Clients can still choose to build their digital signage from the ground up, if they have the assets and expertise to do so, or to mix ScreenScape-provided media and templates with their own content.

 “You can now do it all without leaving ScreenScape5,” said Hemphill. “The result is more striking, more engaging digital signage content, even by non-technical, non-designers.”

In addition, he said ScreenScape5 will provide customers with an optional mobile set-up.

He said one of the key pain points ScreenScape5 will address for business owners will be the cost of hiring outside agencies to create content for their digital signage. ScreenScape’s low-cost subscription model drastically reduces prices compared to existing service-based solutions in the digital signage industry.

ScreenScape currently has 25 employees, up two from the beginning of the year, and has plans to hire one or two additional employees by the end of the year.

The company didn’t do any additional fundraising to create ScreenScape5 – the development was paid for entirely with cash-flow, said Hemphill.

ScreenScape’s clients include Hyundai, Costco, and Amazon. Hemphill said Amazon uses ScreenScape in more than 100 locations for employee-facing messaging. Most of the design work is handled by local managers and IT without any need for designers.

“We now feel like we have, bar none, the best solution, especially for the price, in the marketplace,” said Hemphill. “The [makeover] was a defensive move but, boy, are we glad we did it right.”