Per-device licensing vs cloud seats: what to demand from a signage vendor

Licensing feels like a procurement footnote. It isn't. It's an architecture decision in disguise. How a vendor licenses its software determines what your screens do during an outage, what an RMA costs you, whether a secure site is even possible, and what you're left with if the vendor stops trading. Those are operational questions, and by the time they matter it's too late to renegotiate.

We license per device, keyed to hardware, and we'd rather explain why than have you find out later. Here are the four questions worth asking any vendor, including us.

1. What does a screen do when it can't reach you?

This is the question. If a licence must be validated against the vendor's cloud before content plays, then their outage is your outage, and their business continuity is your business continuity.

The safer architecture keeps the decision on the device: the player holds a signed licence verdict it can verify locally, and keeps playing through a network interruption rather than blanking. Ask specifically: "if your cloud is unreachable for a week, what is on my screens?" Any answer other than "your content" is a risk you're accepting.

2. What is a licence attached to?

Per screen, per player, per site, per user seat? It sounds like billing semantics until you need to move one.

We key a licence to the player's real hardware MAC address. That gives it a physical anchor: a licence can't quietly drift onto unauthorised hardware, and an estate audit becomes a list of MACs rather than a spreadsheet of assertions. It also means a licence is a thing you can point at, which matters more than it sounds when someone asks you to prove compliance.

3. What happens at an RMA?

Hardware dies. A store gets refitted. A player is replaced. The question is whether that's a portal action or a purchase order.

It should be the former: unassign the licence from the dead unit, assign it to the replacement, done. If a vendor's answer involves buying a new licence because the old one is welded to a dead device, that's a recurring cost hidden inside your failure rate, and it scales with the size of your estate.

4. Can it work with no internet at all?

Not "offline-tolerant", but genuinely air-gapped. Government facilities, defence sites, secure retail and some industrial networks have no path to the internet by design, and that breaks any licensing scheme that needs to phone home to activate.

The workable answer is a cryptographically signed licence file, issued once and verified on the device against published public keys. The player can prove the licence is genuine without ever contacting the vendor. If a vendor can't do this, they can't serve those sites, and no amount of roadmap will change it, because it's a consequence of how they built activation.

The honest trade-off

Per-device licensing isn't free of downsides, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It means you count devices, and adding a screen means adding a licence. There's no fuzzy "seats" pool to hide growth in. It also means a signed offline licence, once issued, cannot be remotely revoked. That's precisely the property that makes air-gapped deployment work, and it's why we can't refund an offline seat for the rest of its validity. We'd rather say that in a blog post than in a support ticket.

What we'd ask if we were buying

• ✓If your cloud is down for a week, what is on my screens?
• ✓Can a licence move to replacement hardware, and what does that cost?
• ✓Can this run on a network with no internet access at all?
• ✓Are the capabilities I need included, or behind a tier?
• ✓What happens to my screens if you stop trading?

The last one is the one nobody asks, and it's the one that should decide the shortlist.