NEO Advertising partnering with RMS Networks for US expansion?

I ran across this wire post indicating that long-time BroadSign customer (perhaps their biggest) NEO Advertising would be partnering with RMS and using their software and content creation services for expansion into the US and Canada. Normally this kind of news would be a non-starter with me, but a few things struck me as peculiar. For one, I met the two co-founders of Neo a while back, and they seemed pretty happy with BroadSign. I mean -- I bashed it pretty hard, but they wouldn't hear any of it. Second, RMS's software "product" is quite green -- most of their efforts fall on the content creation side, the rVue package is offered free as an afterthought. Although, it's based on their own internal software bits and pieces which has been around for ages, so if Neo is going to have RMS produce the content AND schedule/apply it, I might see it working.

As for NEO's successful entrance into the US market, that will be an interesting thing to watch. They have a massive footprint in Europe thanks to an initial first-mover advantage and later acquisitions. They have a much more modest footprint in Canada, again through acquisition. But in the US, they're not even a player yet. And we have *tons* of networks here already, based on dozens of business models and probably as many different hardware and software platforms. Simply jumping in with another offering probably won't work. But growth through acquisition could be more expensive than elsewhere. Unless, of course, they plan to buy up the networks of other BroadSign retail customers and convert them wholesale to use RMS technology. That seems pretty far-fetched though. Alternatively, somebody could be lying, but it's generally considered bad form to send out press releases that are patently untrue.

So those are my thoughts. What about you? And Dave Haynes, care to comment? (probably not ;)