• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 6, 2013

While not every digital display sold necessarily carries advertising, shipments of digital signage are a pretty good bellwether for the digital out-of-home advertising business that depends on them. And judging by the latest industry data, cutting edge LCD signage -- and with it , DOOH -- are booming.

The data, drawn from NPD DisplaySearch’s elegantly titled “Quarterly FPD Public Display Shipment and Forecast Report,” shows total worldwide revenues from LCD signage shipments jumped 22%, from around $734 million in the first quarter of 2012, to around $897 million in the first quarter of 2013. Meanwhile the number of units shipped increased 5%, from 514,800 to 539,000.

The proportionally greater increase in revenue suggests that buyers are investing in larger, more technically sophisticated (the industry lingo is “fancy”) equipment, which according to NPD includes a lot of wide, narrow displays used to make video walls of the kind seen ever-more-frequently in malls, airports, movie theaters, hotels, and basically everywhere else you look. Digital signage operators are also upgrading to brighter displays with higher resolutions.

Indeed, LCD displays measuring 60 inches and up are the fastest-growing part of the digital signage marketplace; looking ahead, NPD predicts that their share of total shipments will jump from 9.6% in 2012 to 16.3% by 2017. In unit terms that means an increase from an estimated 308,000 units in 2013 to over a million four years from now.

On the ad revenue front, in a separate forecast PQ Media estimates that global DOOH revenues will grow 12.6% to around $8.9 billion in 2013, a slight improvement over the 11.4% increase to $7.88 billion in 2012.