September 9th, 2026
A migration project rarely gets scheduled because everything is going well. Something usually forces the question first: maybe a vendor gets acquired by a company with different priorities, a platform shuts down completely, the existing system has quietly stopped meeting the organization’s needs, or leadership finally decides five point solutions should become one.
That was the jumping-off point of a recent episode of The AV Life podcast, recorded August 15, 2026, where host Tim Van Woeart brought together Troy Hanna of 22Miles, Murphy Daley, Renee Benson of Sony, Brandy Johnson, and Nancy Blanchard of ScreenBeam to talk through what actually makes migrating digital signage software succeed.
The conversation used digital signage as its primary example, and the panel’s advice lines up with how 22Miles approaches every migration it runs.
Migration Doesn't Fail on the Technology, It Fails on the Planning.
Murphy Daley, the project manager on the panel, walked through the five phases that structure any complex rollout: initiation, planning and design, execution, monitoring and control, and closing. That framework isn’t specific to digital signage, but Troy made the case for why it matters so much in this context specifically: identifying a project owner, understanding what end users actually need, planning for the unknowns, and keeping communication open the entire way through keep the project on track.
The distinction between a project manager and a project owner came up, and it’s a useful one. The PM organizes the team and keeps the phases moving. The project owner is the person on the customer’s side who’s the actual go-to for that system, aka the “CMS guy,” the person who signs off when priorities conflict. Migrations that go sideways often have a PM but no clear owner, which means decisions stall while waiting for someone who was never identified as responsible for making them.
Why Hardware Partnerships Make or Break a Migration
Renee Benson brought the hardware side of the migration conversation to life, describing Sony’s ongoing collaboration with 22Miles as a genuine partnership rather than a vendor checkbox: 22Miles had a standing presence in Sony’s booth at InfoComm 2026, and Sony’s nationwide roadshows regularly put the two side by side for customers evaluating a full stack, not just a screen.
Troy picked up the thread from there, noting that 22Miles works the same way with hardware partners like Sony and BrightSign, each side keeping the other in the loop as new features and capabilities roll out, so a migration doesn’t hit a compatibility wall nobody saw coming. We saw this on full display at InfoComm, where Sony’s wall displayed the full range of manufacturer partners running behind its screens. Troy also pointed to seven different media players on his own setup, one of his favorite ways to show off 22Miles’ hardware-agnostic design in demos.
Renee summed up the relationship between Sony and 22Miles simply: “22Miles is a great partner of ours,” a comment that says less about a single account win and more about how much a migration’s success now depends on the software and hardware sides actually talking to each other before a customer has to.
Why Digital Signage Software Migrations Actually Happen
Brandy Johnson summed up the underlying pattern plainly on the show: a lot of organizations aren’t happy with what they have, or they’ve ended up with too many vendors in the mix and want to get everything under one umbrella. That’s consistent with what shows up on the ground constantly right now. Two recent, real examples: Scala’s acquisition by a retail-focused company and X2O Media’s shutdown both forced their customers into an unplanned migration decision on someone else’s timeline, not their own.
That’s the landscape the podcast conversation was built around: migration is frequently not optional, and the organizations that handle it best are the ones who treat it as a planned project the moment the trigger appears, rather than a scramble.
Plan for the Unknowns, or Build Them Live
Troy described a recent migration for a large healthcare manufacturing organization where something as specific as text formatting inside a text box wasn’t supported in the existing setup.
Rather than telling the customer to work around it, 22Miles built the capability during the migration itself. That’s a small example, but it’s the point Troy kept returning to when talking about what separates a smooth digital signage software migration from a stalled one: plan for the unknowns, and be willing to meet a customer’s actual requirement instead of the requirement the original scope assumed.
Nancy Blanchard’s experience at ScreenBeam echoed the same pattern from a different seat in the industry. A bundle of tools covering emergency alerts and tickers came directly out of customer feedback asking for a signage player that didn’t exist yet.
Across manufacturers, resellers, and CMS providers, the panel kept landing on the same conclusion: customer feedback is what actually drives what gets built next.
The Case for Starting Small
Troy was direct about his own preference for proof-of-concept deployments: start small, prove the system works in a real environment, and expand from there rather than committing an entire organization to a platform before anyone has used it under real conditions.
The panel also flagged a less glamorous but genuinely important step that gets skipped constantly: cleaning up legacy data before it moves into a new system. Garbage in, garbage out applies to a content library just as much as it applies to a database.
Three Rules for a Migration That Don’t Derail Everything Else
Troy closed with three rules he comes back to on every migration: don’t panic, don’t recreate the past, and think beyond the features in front of you. He added a bonus rule that ties the other three together: find a team you can trust and rely on.
That last point is worth sitting with. It’s the reason 22Miles’ migration work is structured as a full-service engagement rather than a software handoff: content migration, a hardware retention strategy since 22Miles is hardware agnostic and most existing screens can stay in place, a phased rollout for organizations with multiple buildings, training, and dedicated support through the first 30 days after go-live. The panel’s advice and 22Miles’ actual playbook for running a digital signage software migration describe the same process from two different vantage points.
If your organization is facing a migration you didn’t plan for, whether a vendor got acquired, shut down, or just stopped being the right fit, Troy Hanna and the rest of the panel’s full conversation is worth the listen, and 22Miles’ DX Pro™ is built to run exactly the kind of project they’re describing.
