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 elasticity, we have the data behind it and everything else to be able to very efficiently, schedule it to a whole bunch of screens. Are you there with that, or are you more focused on the small to medium business market? 

Alastair Taft: We are very scalable. I have a lot of experience building software that scales. For example, I've done some work for one of the largest supermarkets here in the past, and we've rolled out this personalized video that went out to half the country, so we can handle scaling with a software. 

Market that tends to be small to medium size businesses, but that doesn't mean we can't handle hundreds of screens. What we can do is if you want to roll out the same content to hundreds of screens, you can create what we call a Playlist, and on the Playlist, you can either have it looping content. You could have one item if you wanted to, or you could have very complex rules that you layer. If you have some certain thing you want to show on a certain date, or you want to show some out of hours or business hours content, then what you can do is set your screens to play this Playlist, and then every time you change that Playlist, it will deploy it to all your screens automatically. 

So when you were developing this, did you and your coding partner at that time put any time into looking at what other platforms did and how they were presented and the overall functionality, or did you just pretty much say, okay, this is the task, let's write something that addresses the task.

Alastair Taft: Yeah, we did look at a bit of other platforms at the time. What we found is there's quite a lot of clunky tech out there. A lot of the CMSs just seem quite clunky to use. I know there are a couple that are quite good that are out now, but not when we started.

How do you define clunky? What is it that you found clunky? 

Alastair Taft: Oh, you just have this feeling when you use it, like you press a button and you have to wait like a year before it does anything, I think, or, you look under the hood and it's pulling in about a thousand different dependencies and yeah, it's not nice to use really.

Yeah, it's one thing that I've spoken about a few times with people when they asked me about software platforms, and I said these days, if you are still releasing version 8 on the same software stack that you've been supporting for 15-20 years, I think that's troublesome, versus companies that are relentlessly modern and using whatever tool sets are available right now that can optimize what's possible.

Alastair Taft: Yeah, for sure. It's a fast-moving place, front-end development. So you have to keep up to date all the time. 

When you hear from customers, what's the impression you get from them in terms of what they want, and how does this meet it? 

Alastair Taft: So we hear a lot of positive things from customers about how easy it is to use. We have quite a few coming over from other platforms saying, “Oh, we really like this. It's a joy to schedule content.” 

Is that the big ask, just the ease of use? 

Alastair Taft: For our customers, I think they find we're probably quite affordable compared to other CMSs as well, which I'm sure helps. 

Yeah, you're a software as a service, right? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. 

If I'm remembering correctly, your pricing was USD 3.75 a month per screen. Is that really per edge device? 

Alastair Taft: That's right. Yeah. Per screen at $3.75, which I think is correct, but it makes us very competitive. I think there's only one other CMS that is that price. 

The counter, not argument, but the question would be, okay, how do you make money at that? 

Alastair Taft: We don't have all the bells and whistles like monitoring. Our focus is on a really simple platform to use for scheduling content and a reliable player and we're focusing on Android at the moment. So if that's what you need to do, we're a great option. 

Android player, what flavor? I'm looking at the website and the minimum version is Android 7, and you're saying any Android media player or any device like I've heard through the years companies say, okay, now we have our own media player because we want to get away from trying to support all these rogues gallery of different players out there, everything from really good stuff to junk that costs $49.

Alastair Taft: It's certainly a challenge supporting the different versions of Android. So it's a very hard thing to do, and we've solved a lot of things we've come across. But that is our goal. We want to support consumers' Android devices, and there's a lot of, I don't want to say tricks, but there's a lot of things you can do that we have to do to make them work reliably.

You're also on the Google Play store. So, is that for Chrome OS? 

Alastair Taft: No, it's for Android devices. 

Oh, okay. So it's just how you would get the player. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, or you can either install via the Chrome Store or the Amazon app store, or you can download our APK off our website and install directly.

You're on Fire Sticks as well?

Alastair Taft: That's right. 

Is that the official digital signage Fire Stick or the older ones? 

Alastair Taft: I believe we're not part of the software that comes pre-installed, and you can't get the official signage Fire Sticks over in Australia yet, but I imagine we're on there if you search for us. 

 

Again, your market, in many respects, are people who can't invest a lot of time and don't want to invest a lot of money in digital signage. So they want something affordable. It's not a big cost month to month, not a big cost front end, and it's gotta be dead simple so that they can sit down for half an hour or whatever it is a week to do things.

Alastair Taft: Yeah, pretty much. I want something reliable. Like you said, I don't want to worry about it too much. Get something up and running. I don't have to think about it too much. Easy to use. That's where we sit. 

You mentioned you don't have device management. Is that something that's nullified if you have a stable software stack, to worry around having device management? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, that's what we're going for. So you plug it in, it auto boots when you turn your device on, and it just keeps running. It's really simple, and it's a conscious choice. The more stuff we try and do, the more things that can go wrong. So we try to build a really simple solution that's just gonna stay up. 

What would be a typical customer? Like, how would you describe them? 

Alastair Taft: So I suppose the only correlation we have is the small to medium businesses, mainly the people that come to us. But we've got quite a few that kind of use it for their menus in their food shops, the menu boards, we've got quite a few that use this for that.

There's no kind of one industry that we're gravitating to. We've got corporate environments. We've got builders, merchants, and adventure playgrounds using us - no correlation, really. 

How are they all finding you? 

Alastair Taft: Some people find us just through organic search. We do now and again run a few ads, and that's it, really, at the moment. We've got some other ideas in the works, but we haven't done them yet. 

So it's all inbound. Do you have any outbound sales efforts? 

Alastair Taft: No, we're very laid back, really, don't like the hard sales tactics for call people and harassing them. So we don't do anything like that with our pricing either. It's all very simple and straightforward. 

Yeah. You're a software developer first, so having to do the sales and management side of this, I'm sure, is not your favorite part of the day. 

Alastair Taft: Not really. I like being in the weeds with the tech.

How do you manage, how do you balance that? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, it's a struggle. I keep it about 50-50. 50% on tech business and 50% on business development. 

Is this the only thing you're working on, or are you still doing work for startups? 

Alastair Taft: Mainly, this is the thing I work on. There's the occasional startup I help out on, but this is primarily my full-time job.

I have the sense that as a software developer, if you love this side of what you do, you don't do version one and then just leave it. I suspect you're constantly iterating. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, improvements are being rolled out all the time. You'll never notice them because they apply automatically, but we're very careful about testing before we roll anything out, but there are always improvements happening. 

Is it based on what you're seeing, or are you getting feedback from customers saying, Hey, it would be great if, if we could do this?

Alastair Taft: Yeah, we get feedback all the time asking for X, Y, and Z. We can't do it all, but we collate and use it as a kind of indicator of where to go next. But we're always working on the core underlying thing. So there might not be a feature all the time, but we're making the tech reliable and doing as much as we can to squeeze everything we can out of our player.

What about the security side? 

Alastair Taft: So, for the accounts, we do something a little bit differently. We never ask for passwords. You log in for a magic link that gets sent to your email, so your email is the login. I think more and more people are doing that, but that means we don't ever store anybody's passwords, which I think is better and a screen can only access its content, and it has its kind of authentication that you set up when you pair it, and that all happens automatically. 

I suspect that most of your client base are small businesses and some companies, workplaces, and so on, who maybe aren't thinking as much about security anyways, or are they like a larger company where they are concerned about it?

Alastair Taft: I suppose the small businesses aren't really thinking about it, but we do everything to protect them. So yeah, screens can only access their own content, and the only way you can get into the account is via email. So everything's pretty secure there. 

Is it always evident that you're using Luna screens, or do you have any partners who are white labeling your solution?

Alastair Taft: So we don't advertise any of the white labeling options or any enterprise options, but we do have a couple of customers that do that. But predominantly, no, we don't white label, but it's something we can do. 

There's been a lot of talk for several years now about the importance of APIs and how you need to be able to intermingle and work with other systems within a business. Are you doing that? 

Alastair Taft: So we have a pretty easy-to-use API under the hood, but we haven't made it available to the public. It's something we probably will do in the future, but right now, the focus is on a reliable Android player and a really simple CMS. 

Going back to the hardware, when Android first started being used for digital science media players, probably going back a dozen years, perhaps even longer. There were some good boxes. There were a lot of terrible boxes. 

One of the biggest challenges with them was that they were moving targets in terms of the build and the electronics that were inside the little plastic shell. Is it better now? More stable? 

Alastair Taft: There are some really good devices out there. For example, I've looked at the specs of the Amazon signage stick, and I've got comparable devices that I tested on myself and they work really well. So when we started, we were testing on the underpowered Fire Sticks because we figured if we can get it working on that, we can get it working on anything, and yeah, there is a big difference between devices depending on what specs you have. 

So, for example, with the underpowered Fire Stick, you wouldn't want to be running 4k video on it. It wouldn't perform so well. So you do have to get a decent box for what you want to do, but if you just want a slideshow of images, it'd probably be fine, right? 

When you get new customers and they say, “Hey, this is great. We want to go; we're looking at your screen, and it says you support Android. What do we buy?”  Do you give them recommendations on different devices that are reliable? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. So we were recommending it because we want to run on consumer stuff, and we were recommending using the Chromecast because it's not too expensive, and it's a pretty good piece of hardware, but that's now been discontinued, I believe, so like you said, we probably will shortly offer our own box just as an option. So people can get something that's going to work well without having to think about it too much. 

Amazon signage sticks and all those devices, I believe pretty much all of them come from China and you can find some good boxes if you know what you're looking for on the Chinese websites like AliExpress and Alibaba. They are the same ones that Amazon orders anyway, except they're not as expensive, even though they're pretty cheap as they are anyway. 

I'm curious about the state of software development when it comes to AI and I keep reading stories about software as a service platform being at risk because Agentic AI, the idea that you can just get AI to write an agent that's going to do everything you need it to do, is going to take the place of a lot of, particularly the more expensive, like CRM systems and all that sort of thing if you can get AI to just write something that serves your needs.

Do you see that as a threat? Is that more just people prognosticating as opposed to having a real good sense of what's possible? 

Alastair Taft: So I might differ in opinion to what a lot of other people will say here, but no, I'm not worried. If you ever see what code AI can produce, it'll create you more problems than it will solve and if you, imagine roughly how it works, the AI creates the next likely code in the sequence. So if you're writing some code, AI will figure out what you're the next based off, breaking it down to tokens, and figure out what the next piece of code is to write. It's been trained on everything available on the internet. 

So if you want to create something mediocre, use AI because it will be the average of what else is out there. 

Whatever you think of it, It's come a long way in about a year and a half in terms of capabilities. Do you see a point when it will get good, or does it just have fundamental limitations? 

Alastair Taft: I think we're hitting the limit because how it works is that it creates the next token in the sequence, and it'll have a matrix of, possible combinations, but every time you add like a new dimension to that matrix, you're exponentially making the computation bigger and bigger, so at some point, there's just no way this can get any better. 

So in terms of Luna screens, what's the size of your footprint? Are you in like thousands working with thousands of devices, hundreds of devices? You've only been at it for a year. 

Alastair Taft: So yeah, we're pretty small. Our customers are probably in the hundreds, we've probably got around a thousand screens we manage. So, yeah, early days, but we're going in the right direction, growing every day. So that's a good sign. 

Is most of that business now in Australia? 

Alastair Taft: No, it's all around the world. There's no one country that seems to gravitate, we've got quite a few customers in the US, quite a few in Canada, lots in Europe, quite a few in Australia too. 

Does it present a problem at all in terms of customer support or everything's email and if you write it correctly, you don't have a lot of support issues?

Alastair Taft:  That's the plan. If an issue comes up, we provide help straight away, and we look at how we can make this happen again. Okay. So the support effort is generally quite low, which is, I think, good. It's a measure that our customers aren't hitting issues, which I think is good.

Yeah, you don't want a 40-person call center that gets expensive. 

You're down in Tasmania and Hobart, not a part of the world I've ever been in, and I understand it's beautiful. Is there much of a tech scene down there? 

Alastair Taft: It's got some quiet achievers down here. There's a company called Procreate that makes this awesome software for tablets for artists to do drawing and they, you don't hear much about them down here, but they're huge. They're all over the world. So yeah, there are some quiet achievers down here. 

And you've always been down in Tasmania?

Alastair Taft: I'm originally from the UK, I came here about 10 years ago.

Oh, that's a big change. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. Although if I could go anywhere, this is probably the most English Australian place I could have gone to. The weather's the same. They drive on the same side of the road. 

The weather’s the same? 

Alastair Taft: Pretty much, yeah. When you think of Australia, you think of it as really hot, but Tasmania is the furthest south you can go.

Yeah, you're as close as you're going to get to Antarctica, right? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, but it's not cold, it's very similar to English weather. 

Oh, I didn't realize that. Was that an unfortunate discovery? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, I landed up here by chance cause I was coming here for work, but, if I had a choice, probably should have gone somewhere a bit sunnier.

Yeah, it could have been in Queensland or something like that. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. Although not at the moment, they've got a cyclone there, but yes. 

True. Alright, Alastair. Thank you. That was terrific. Very interesting to hear about your company. 

Alastair Taft: Great. Thanks for having me on. Great to chat.