I read a lot of reports that nobody expects an AV company to read.
That is partly the job. Marketing directors end up subscribed to things. But it is mostly because AV sits downstream of decisions made somewhere else entirely, and the documents that explain those decisions are not written for us. They are written for media agencies, for advertisers, for people who buy audiences rather than screens.
Which is a problem, because a few of them are about us.
The industry data on digital out-of-home is one. It is filed as a media document. Read it as an AV person and it turns into something else.
The forecast
The IAB’s Compass data puts UK DOOH investment at £964m in 2025, a record. DOOH accounts for 67% of all UK out-of-home spend, with a forecast of 76% by 2031. Programmatic, the automated buying of that inventory, is projected to go from 9% of out-of-home spend to 24% over the same period.
Everyone in media reads that as a demand story. Money moving into the channel.
Read it from where I sit, in the supply chain, and it is a screen replacement forecast.
Ad revenue is what pays for the estate
Media owners fund their capital expenditure from advertising revenue. Screens go up because the space they occupy can be sold. So when revenue into a channel rises, the estate behind that channel gets built and rebuilt. A digital share moving from two-thirds toward three-quarters is paper and older LCD coming down and LED going up, site by site, over several years.
The media industry looks at that data and asks how it wins more budget from Meta and Google. We should look at the same data and ask who installs all of it.
And it is not just a forecast
Forecasts are easy to wave away. The current numbers are harder.
Outsmart, the trade body for UK out-of-home, publishes quarterly revenue figures collated by PwC. For the first quarter of 2026, total UK out-of-home revenue came in at £341.2m, up 15% on the same quarter a year earlier. Within that, digital grew 17.6% year on year. Classic formats grew 10.1%.
Digital is growing faster than classic, and has been for years. That gap is the hardware story, because it is the part funded by new installations rather than by charging more for what is already there.
Classic is not dying, though. Paper and paste in the right location still grew by a tenth in a single quarter. Anyone telling you the old formats are finished is selling you something.
Digital share of revenue, Q1 2026
One number complicates that. Digital’s share of revenue in Q1 2026 was 67%, the same share it held across 2024 and across 2025. Flat for two years, even while digital grows faster in absolute terms. The journey to 76% is a long grind, not a hockey stick.
Which is worth knowing before anyone builds a plan on it. Disappointing if you were hoping to build a business on this inside a year. Reassuring if you were worried you had already missed it.
The second number is the more interesting one
The next phase of growth will not come from more screens alone. It will come from making those screens easier to access and more accountable.
The share going programmatic, 9% to 24%, is where you can see that happening.
Programmatic buying means an advertiser can buy a specific screen, in a specific place, at a specific moment, through a platform, often without a phone call. For that to work, the inventory has to be discoverable, standardised and reportable. A buyer needs to know the screen exists, what it is, and that the ad actually played.
The industry is building that plumbing right now: a shared inventory database, and a system to standardise playout reporting across UK media owners so that proof of play looks the same wherever it comes from.
Which raises the bar on what gets installed. A screen dark for a day is not an inconvenience, it is lost revenue against inventory that was available to sell. Two screens in the same network that do not match is a specification problem the buyer can see. Inventory nobody can report on struggles to earn automated budget at all.
Uptime, consistency and serviceability stop being technical footnotes. They become commercially load-bearing.
Which changes who you are selling to
If you sell into corporate, education or retail, your customer wants a screen that works quietly for as long as possible at a price that survives procurement. Support is something they want to exist. It rarely wins the deal.
A media owner buys differently, because their downside is measurable. They can tell you what a day of downtime costs. So the questions come earlier and harder: response times, where the spares are, who actually turns up, what happens in year four.
Corporate / education / retail
“A screen that works quietly for as long as possible at a price that survives procurement. Support is something they want to exist. It rarely wins the deal.”
Media owner
“Their downside is measurable. Response times, where the spares are, who actually turns up, what happens in year four.”
None of that is exotic. It is the same product knowledge good AV resellers already have, in a different order of priority. But it means support and warranty belong at the front of the conversation rather than in the small print.
You may already be closer to this than you think
The line between digital signage and digital out-of-home is thinner than the vocabulary suggests. Technically, they are often the same installation. The difference is whether someone is selling the space on it.
Drive-thru. Wayfinding in a shopping centre. Screens in gyms, in transport hubs, in forecourts. A lot of AV resellers are already installing in places where somebody is monetising the screen. They just have not framed the work that way, or asked who else in that customer’s world holds a media budget.
That reframing is free. It means reading your own installed base and asking which of those sites has an advertising conversation attached to it.
In-store is the closest version of this to your existing business
A retail media network is a retailer selling advertising space inside its own estate. Screens at the entrance, above the aisle, at the till, on the forecourt. The audience is a shopper minutes away from buying something, which is why brand budgets have moved there quickly.
One caution
Most in-store screens are not in that £341.2m, because retail media is measured separately. The exception is when an out-of-home media owner runs a retailer’s network for them, in which case that revenue does land in the out-of-home numbers. So you cannot add the two markets together and call the total your opportunity.
The part that matters for hardware is ownership. Plenty of early retail media deals involved the network operator putting screens in at no upfront cost and recovering it through a share of advertising revenue over the term. Retailers have been doing the arithmetic on those contracts. Some are concluding they would rather fund the estate themselves, own it outright, and sell the space directly.
Every time that decision goes that way, a screen that would have arrived as somebody else’s capital becomes a purchase instead. With a specification, a budget holder, and a requirement for someone to install and support it.
That is a procurement conversation. AV resellers are already good at those.
So where does Solstice come into this?
We are not new to LED, and we are not new to outdoor. Billboard formats, drive-thru, street furniture, wayfinding, custom builds for sites that have to survive British weather and run every day without anyone climbing up to look at them. Some of that work already sits on screens that are, in every practical sense, out-of-home inventory. A screen does not know which trade body its owner belongs to.
What we have less of is a trading history inside the out-of-home community itself. We have not grown up alongside its media owners, and where we do have those relationships they sit with individuals rather than across the company. It is a small sector, and blurring that distinction would be the last thing we did.
Deep on the product, experienced on the installation, newer to the room. I would rather say that plainly than overclaim a heritage we do not have, or talk down fifteen years of LED that we do.
If you are already working in this space, I would like to know how you read those numbers, because you will read them differently to me.
And if you are not: is there a screen you have already installed that somebody else is selling advertising on?
Sources: IAB UK Compass, Digital Out-of-Home; Outsmart / PwC UK OOH revenue figures, Q1 2026.
