Where I work they have a few gratuitous large-screen displays that in reality just suck up electricity while presenting slides about how "green" our IT organization is.
They use Mac Minis, with full-screen Chrome to run the slideshow, and I often see error messages on these (though typically from having dropped the wifi connection and not from an OS panic or other real error).
I can tell from experience that having a really solid error free digital signage solution takes up a lot of time, because you really want to care about every tiny detail that could go wrong. One example is sudden lack of network connectivity while displaying a website:
- One solution is to just display an error page (bad!)
- Another solution is to display a cached version of the page. Sounds great until you have to display stocks.
- The proper solution is to display a cached version, except for time critical data where you either go to the next piece of content, and if that's impossible, display the customer logo or some default fallback content.
This and thousands of other small configurations are what make up a good digital signage solution. The default web browser, being made for user interaction, doesn't cover it, obviously.
They use Mac Minis, with full-screen Chrome to run the slideshow, and I often see error messages on these (though typically from having dropped the wifi connection and not from an OS panic or other real error).