I entirely work with museums, where there are lots and lots of considerations in re: rendering device. The considerations for eg a commercial display are a little different, but I don’t have experience with working with those sorts of clients, so my answer is from the perspective of the media art context.
Having a separate box is just good separation of concerns - you can hook it up to whatever kind of projector you like (one projector might cost as much as $100k!), or you might need to use an analog display device (eg a CRT monitor) which certainly won’t have any USB/SD compatibility, in which case you will need some sort of hardware to convert signals appropriately. The separation of concerns just gives you much more flexibility.
Additionally, as mentioned before, you can network the boxes, which lets you do things like creating multi-channel synchronized video art installations.
Most BrightSigns also have GPIO pins on them, so I’ve even done things where I’ve synchronized kinetic art to the video playback.
You can write entire custom applications for your brightsigns (or plugins to the BrightAuthor configuration engine) - it’s just its own self contained platform, so there are a lot of benefits to having it be agnostic to the display.
Having a separate box is just good separation of concerns - you can hook it up to whatever kind of projector you like (one projector might cost as much as $100k!), or you might need to use an analog display device (eg a CRT monitor) which certainly won’t have any USB/SD compatibility, in which case you will need some sort of hardware to convert signals appropriately. The separation of concerns just gives you much more flexibility.
Additionally, as mentioned before, you can network the boxes, which lets you do things like creating multi-channel synchronized video art installations.
Most BrightSigns also have GPIO pins on them, so I’ve even done things where I’ve synchronized kinetic art to the video playback.
You can write entire custom applications for your brightsigns (or plugins to the BrightAuthor configuration engine) - it’s just its own self contained platform, so there are a lot of benefits to having it be agnostic to the display.