info-beamer hosted - a long-term solution

Our vision

We want to provide you with a solution you can rely on for many years. There are several factors that contribute to this goal.

Continued hardware support

Raspberry Pi is committed to long product lifetimes and availability. You can very likely still buy an old Pi 1 today, in case you need to replace existing hardware with an identical model. With info-beamer running on the Raspberry Pi you also get those benefits.

Continued software support

Of course hardware without software is pretty useless. We designed our operating system to fully embrace long lifetimes of your devices.

Our service was initially released in 2014. Back then, the Raspberry Pi 1 was still the latest model. More than 12 years later, the Pi 1 is still fully supported in info-beamer. Such an old device of course cannot run all content, but if you've installed your Pi 1 back then, it still receives over-the-air software updates and it is still fully functional today.

Our goal is to never abandon old Pi models for as long as possible while maintaining full compatibility with newer devices. So far all ever released Pi models are still fully supported. If you set up a device today, it's likely that you'll never have to touch it again for the next decade, but still get updates and full remote management.

Sustainable business model

Our company is boot-strapped and profitable. We are not dependant on any investor and are in full control of our own future. This avoids chasing short-term hypes and other distractions and allows focusing on the core of our product.

If you've started using info-beamer 10 years ago, you likely still recognize most aspects of how our service works today. We intend to not throw away user interface convensions or looks just because something shiny comes along. Instead we intend to gradually improve our interface to make your work easier while maintaining a familiar environment.

Hardware reliablity

With 12 years of hindsight, it is now obvious that the Raspberry Pi is a very reliable device. Unless you have bad luck with the selection of your SD card, you will probably never encounter any hardware problems preventing your devices from displaying their content. Our operating system minimizes SD card writes to the bare minimum to improve longevity.

There are now devices running on info-beamer hosted that have been online for 10 years continuously. They still run as reliable as on their first day.

Should the SD card in a device fail for any reason, a replacement flow helps getting your device up and running again with minimal work: Just copy installation files to a new card and put it back into the Pi.

Software reliability

Our operating system is designed to be as reliable as possible. Once installed you never have to physically visit a device again. Everything can be fully controlled remotely and the operating system can automatically recover and repair a bunch of potential problems on its own. Like, for example, data corruption after a sudden power loss.

Unlike some other solutions out there, the update process is fully integrated into our operating system. Updates are applied completely in the background while the device continues to show its content. Only a single 30 second reboot is needed to switch into the next version. This avoids long downtimes.

The update process is fully atomic. This means that either the update is fully applied or the device remains unchanged. It will never end up in an half-updated or broken state. This ensures that updates are reliable and predictable. Should an update result in a device not being able to connect to our service again for any reason, it will automatically and completely roll back to the previous version as if nothing happened.

info-beamer is one of the few Raspberry Pi based solutions out that offers such a complete life-cycle management. Other services often have no built-in solution for updates and expect you to manually rewrite devices or abandon old hardware altogether. This is unacceptable in our opinion and we solved the resulting technical challenges by carefully desiging our operating system.