Digital signage has moved well beyond the static slideshow on a lobby TV. In 2025, businesses of every size are rethinking how they use screens to communicate — with customers, employees, and visitors. Whether you’re running a single storefront or managing displays across dozens of locations, these five trends are worth paying attention to.
A few years ago, on-premise digital signage servers were the norm. Today, cloud-based platforms dominate new deployments. The reason is straightforward: cloud solutions eliminate the need for dedicated hardware, reduce IT overhead, and let teams manage content from anywhere with a browser.
This shift has also made digital signage accessible to smaller businesses that previously couldn’t justify the infrastructure investment. With platforms like IntelDisplay offering plans at $5 per display per month with no tiered feature restrictions, a neighborhood bakery can run the same software as a national retailer.
Cloud platforms also simplify updates and maintenance. There’s no firmware to manually flash and no server patches to schedule — the platform handles it all behind the scenes.
Businesses are moving beyond simple image slideshows. In 2025, the expectation is that a signage platform handles virtually any media format without conversion headaches. Marketing teams want to upload a video from their editing suite, a photo from a designer’s Figma export, or an animation from After Effects — and have it play without fuss.
Platforms built for this reality support extensive format libraries. IntelDisplay, for example, accepts over 200 image formats and all FFmpeg-supported video codecs, with files up to 3 GB. Automatic transcoding handles orientation differences between landscape and portrait screens, so content creators don’t need to produce separate assets for each display type.
The days of someone walking up to a screen with a USB stick are fading fast. Automated scheduling is now a baseline expectation. Businesses want to set rules — “show the breakfast menu from 6 AM to 11 AM, then switch to lunch” — and trust the system to execute them reliably.
Advanced scheduling features like recurring rules, overnight time spans, and priority-based conflict resolution make this possible at scale. When multiple schedules overlap, the system determines which content takes precedence based on predefined priorities, removing the need for manual intervention.
This is especially valuable for multi-location businesses where regional promotions, time zone differences, and local events all affect what should appear on screen at any given moment.
As digital signage becomes central to business operations — not just a nice-to-have — uptime expectations have risen sharply. A blank screen in a retail store or a frozen display in a restaurant drive-through is no longer acceptable.
This has pushed platform developers to invest heavily in offline resilience. Modern player apps cache content locally so that playback continues even during internet outages. Heartbeat monitoring (IntelDisplay uses a 30-second interval) lets administrators see the real-time status of every screen from a central dashboard. Auto-start on boot ensures displays recover automatically after a power interruption.
Reliability isn’t a headline feature, but it’s the one that matters most when things go wrong.
For years, landscape orientation was the default for digital signage. That’s changing. Portrait-mode displays are increasingly popular in retail, hospitality, and wayfinding applications. They’re a natural fit for tall menu boards, directory listings, social media-style content, and narrow spaces like elevator lobbies or between store aisles.
Supporting portrait orientation natively — not as an afterthought — is becoming a differentiator. Platforms that automatically transcode and optimize content for both landscape and portrait at resolutions up to 4K give businesses the flexibility to deploy screens in any configuration without additional production work.
These trends point in one direction: digital signage is becoming simpler to deploy, more flexible in what it can display, and more reliable in how it operates. The businesses that benefit most will be the ones that choose platforms built around these principles rather than legacy systems bolted together over time.
If you’re evaluating digital signage solutions in 2025, focus on cloud architecture, broad format support, robust scheduling, proven reliability, and native orientation flexibility. Those are the foundations that will serve you well as your display network grows.