Executive Summary

Many venues—cafés, small hotels, museums and event spaces—struggle to deliver fast, private offline media to guests because captive portals, limited bandwidth and cloud-dependent CDNs add latency, force user tracking, and increase costs; this is a problem for an addressable market of roughly 50 million venues currently spending about $120/year on guest‑wifi tooling, or a $6.0B TAM. Operators report that captive‑portal flows frequently throttle large file delivery, break streaming UX, and require internet authentication that undermines simple local use cases such as menus, event videos, or curated catalogs. You could build a self‑contained "Local Pi" appliance: a $35–$75 single‑board computer packaged with a prebuilt OS image, secure local media server, content management portal and optional integration points to work alongside a venue’s existing Wi‑Fi so guests can access curated content locally without requiring cloud routing or internet authentication. The timing is favorable—edge compute commoditization lowers hardware and deployment costs, local‑first consumer preferences and regulatory pressure on data export increase demand for on‑prem solutions, and the market evaluation (Market Score 90/100, Revenue Potential 80/100) reflects strong willingness to pay. Competition is medium: established captive‑portal vendors and cloud CDNs are entrenched, but few offer turnkey, privacy‑first on‑prem appliances with simple provisioning. To stand out, focus on provable privacy guarantees (no personal data leaves the premises), one‑click provisioning and updates, compliance toolkits for consent and content licensing, and a clear business model (device sale plus a $5–$10/month content‑management subscription). Be honest about challenges: you will need to manage hardware support at scale, navigate venue network policies and ISP relationships, and secure content licensing and legal clarity—early pilots with 100–500 venues and measurable ROI will be necessary to de‑risk adoption.

Executive Summary

Market Opportunity

Local Pi hotspot bypasses captive-portal limits for offline media sharing targets a $6.0B = 50M venues x $120/year average spending on guest-wifi/captive-portal tooling total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 8-12% annual growth in managed Wi-Fi / hotspot services and event-tech adoption.

Key trends driving demand: local-first experiences -- venues want fast, private content delivery without cloud dependency; edge-compute commoditization -- cheap SBCs and prebuilt images lower deployment costs; privacy & regulation -- greater demand for solutions that minimize user data leaving local networks; event- and experiential-marketing growth -- more live events need ephemeral, offline content delivery; open-source network tooling -- mature open projects (dnsmasq, coova) enable rapid development.

Key competitors include Purple, Tanaza, CoovaChilli / NoDogSplash / pfSense (open-source stack), Cloud4Wi.

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Local Pi hotspot bypasses captive-portal limits for offline media sharing

Executive Summary

Local Pi hotspot bypasses captive-portal limits for offline media sharing

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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