IT Automation Case Study: Komedia Brighton

“AJT took the time to find a proper IT automation solution that worked for our team and that wasn’t too expensive either. We went from fiddling with remote connections every day to scheduling everything from our browsers in minutes. It may seem like a small task, but it had a big impact on our daily workload. Now it’s one less thing to worry about.”
Roxy van der Post, Marketing & Innovations Manager, Komedia, Brighton

Komedia is Brighton’s award-winning independent live arts venue, located in the heart of the North Laine. They host over 700 events per year featuring comedy, live music, cabaret, club nights, and even family shows and themed brunches.

Like many venues, Komedia uses a series of screens around their building to display promotional content, including upcoming shows and video trailers, to keep customers informed and build excitement.

Keeping Komedia’s screens up to date was becoming a significant drain on staff time. Each display was powered by a small ‘stick’ mini PC running Windows. Whenever content needed updating, which was almost daily, someone had to remotely connect into each machine individually to manually swap out the videos or images.

There was no central control, no scheduling, and no easy way to push content to different screens. Ensuring the displays were up-to-date and engaging was important, but getting it done was a repetitive, time-consuming process that took people away from other important tasks.

Komedia is a longstanding customer of AJT Managed IT Services. This project is a good example of what an ongoing relationship makes possible: a collaborative process of improvement over time rather than a quick fix handed over and forgotten.

The first step was addressing the root cause: a lack of any centralised system for managing the display screens. Conscious of budget, we identified a free, open-source digital signage tool that allowed Komedia to automate a lot of the tasks being done manually.

Implementing this software meant content could be scheduled in advance to appear on the right screens and for the right duration automatically, without daily manual intervention. It also provided centralised control over all screens from a single browser window, and the ability to push different videos or images to different screens as needed. Good IT doesn’t have to mean expensive IT!

Komedia’s hardware for the display screens was running on Windows. Windows is a powerful, full-featured operating system, but with that breadth comes overhead. For a small stick PC with one job to do, running a full Windows environment was over the top and causing unnecessary slowness.

We switched the stick PCs from Windows to Linux to give the existing hardware a much lighter, more efficient foundation to work from. Linux powered the new software reliably and extended the life of machines that had been struggling to keep up while running on Windows.

Like all hardware, the original stick PCs had a natural lifespan. As individual units came to the end of theirs, we replaced them with more suitable hardware. The new machines were better specced to support the new display system and keep everything running smoothly for the long term.

Spreading these updates across time rather than doing it all at once also meant no large upfront cost and minimal disruption to Komedia’s day-to-day operations.

Getting the solution to a place where it worked exactly as needed took time and iteration, but that investment has paid off. The system is now well-established, running reliably, and saving the Komedia marketing team time every day.

What once required daily manual work across 5 separate machines can now be handled from a single place. Staff log in, upload content, set a schedule, and they’re done. The slow and frustrating remote connections have been removed entirely.

The team can now plan ahead, scheduling videos and images to appear on specific screens, for specific durations, in advance. With full control over what appears where and for how long, it’s easier to keep displays fresh, relevant, and engaging.

By switching to Linux and choosing lightweight, open-source software, we extended the working life of hardware that would otherwise have been written off far sooner. The gradual hardware refresh ensured long-term reliability without the need for a large upfront investment.

This IT automation project is a good illustration of what good managed IT support really looks like in practice: a series of improvements, tweaks, and upgrades carried out over time, with AJT and Komedia working together to reach a solution that genuinely works.