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Meural’s making a smaller digital art display

Meural’s making a smaller digital art display

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And it’s looking to sell to more corporate clients

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Image: Netgear

Meural is still going strong in the digital art space following its acquisition by Netgear last year. The company’s introducing its third-generation art display today, called the Meural Generation 3.0 Canvas, which will be available in two different sizes for the first time. There will be the usual 27-inch unit and a smaller, cheaper 21.5-inch version. Meural won’t share pricing details around the smaller version, but we can assume it’ll cost less than $595, which is how much the current 27-inch display costs. Both displays have a 1080p resolution. As usual, users can choose from a range of artwork to display on their wall. Pricing and availability details will be released later this year.

The Canvas also features modular frames, so users can swap them out as they want or even take them to a custom frame store to have one made. Four frame colors are available: black, white, light wood, and dark wood. Each Canvas has 8GB of onboard storage, 2GB of RAM, an ambient light sensor, gesture controls, and, fittingly, an updated Wi-Fi chipset that Meural says will be more stable with higher performance.

The company is introducing new features for corporate clients, too, such as a dust-protection cover, Power over Ethernet technology, and, eventually, a plexiglass add-on that could be better for corporate clients who need to clean their displays, like hospitals. “The strategy is around how do you go from tens of thousands of units to hundreds of thousands and eventually millions, so how do you make it broader?” Vlad Vukicevic, Meural co-founder, said to The Verge. “I think commercial and business clients is one area that is definitely part of that.”

It makes sense that Meural would start catering to corporate clients. To begin with, all sorts of businesses need art on their walls, and, presumably, they’d like to be able to keep that artwork fresh by switching it out. Also, you can sell more units to corporations than you can to households, which makes them appealing clients.

While multiple art display companies exist, such as Depict, some are falling by the wayside. For example, Electric Objects, one of the original companies, was sold in 2017 to Giphy. It focused on commissioning digital art and selling its product to consumers at an affordable price, but later, it ended up giving up its hardware business entirely and selling its digital assets to Giphy. Meural has a safety blanket in the form of Netgear, but to make its hardware sales sustainable, it needs to keep moving more units while also encouraging users to sign up for its subscription service.