By Annabelle Kayye
Sales and Success Manager, SpinetiX

LaGuardia has become my favorite airport. First, it’s a Delta hub — team Delta forever. Second, after its renovations, it actually feels like a modern airport: clean, well-organized and surprisingly pleasant. I am not one to be dramatic, but I’d genuinely rather walk to my destination than take three forms of transportation to JFK or brave the hellscape that is Newark’s Terminal B.

Naturally, LaGuardia was my airport of choice when flying home from InfoComm 2025. Like many #AVtweeps, I caught a late-night flight out of Orlando on Friday. As I staggered through Terminal C in a post-show haze, something caught my eye. Alarm bells started going off in my AV brain: digital signage, digital signage, digital signage.

Lo and behold, it was a video wall made up of LCD monitors. One display had been slightly pulled away from the video wall mount. Of course, I had to investigate. And there it was — behind the screen — a media player absolutely caked in dust.

Now, I live in New York City. I get it. It’s dusty. I dust my apartment constantly. But in this brand-new terminal? My little Delta utopia? I was horrified.

At the time, I was too sleep-deprived to snap a photo, but two weeks later I was back at LaGuardia and made a beeline for the same wall (after breezing through TSA PreCheck, naturally). Sadly, someone had already fixed the off-kilter LCD and zip-tied it to the mount. I briefly considered cutting the ties — but getting banned from the only civilized airport in New York seemed like a steep price. I did manage to get a photo from the side, and while it only shows a hint of the dust, trust me: what lurks behind that screen would send any allergy-prone kid straight to the ER.

Here’s the deal: Dust is a media player’s worst nightmare. When dust infiltrates the system, it clogs the ventilation and causes the device to overheat — eventually leading to failure. That’s why selecting a fully enclosed (read: fanless and dustproof) media player is absolutely essential for successful digital signage, especially in high-traffic environments.

So next time you’re specifying signage in a busy public space, make sure your media player is sealed tight. No fans. No dust. Just long-term peace of mind — and maybe, just maybe, your signage will live as long as your love for LaGuardia.