Academy
The fastest honest route from nothing to a TV showing your prices, timed end to end. Plus what a USB stick, a laptop on HDMI and casting from your phone are each still better at.
Day one
From nothing to something readable on the TV you already own, in one sitting.
The fastest honest route from nothing to a TV showing your prices, timed end to end. Plus what a USB stick, a laptop on HDMI and casting from your phone are each still better at.
The real shopping list for digital signage is four things, and three of them are already in the building. Here is the list, what a media player box genuinely buys you, and whether the TV from the stockroom will do.
Open the player on the TV, scan the code with your phone, done. Then the awkward cases: a TV with no browser, a TV out of wifi range, a code the server says is already in use, and what happens when you unpair.
What to type into the prompt box, what comes back, and the three things an AI draft almost always gets wrong: a price, a photograph, and a slide that says too much.
Sideways
A television turned on its end, from the bracket on the wall to a show built for that shape.
Portrait is not a mode you switch on. It is four separate decisions, two of them made with a tape measure and two of them in software, and doing them out of order is why so many vertical boards end up sideways, cropped or just worse than the landscape one they replaced.
A software company's honest hardware page. The hole pattern is the easy part. What actually decides it is the manual, the mount's own rating, and where the infrared receiver ends up.
The mount is right, the rotation is right, and the board still looks like a mistake. That is because a 9:16 board is a column of type read top to bottom, and a disappointing portrait board is usually a wide layout that was turned on its side rather than composed for the shape.
Four different faults produce a board that looks wrong, and they do not look the same as each other. Name the symptom on the wall first, then change one setting. Two of the four are the screen's rotation, fixed from your phone in about ten seconds.
Set and forget
Decide once what airs and when, then leave the screen to get on with the week.
Scheduling in ChannelOS is a channel with a daily timeline, not a playlist pushed to a device. Set a time range and a repeat rule once, and the screen plays the right board at the right hour by itself.
One screen, four menus, and nobody standing at the television at eleven in the morning. A worked cafe day with real hours, then the four things that decide whether it genuinely runs itself: gaps, the handover minute, clashes, and the two things that are allowed to air over the plan.
Four things wear out when a screen never goes off: the panel, the warranty, the electricity meter and the connection. Here is the arithmetic for each one, and the hours worth not running.
A takeover airs over the top of whatever is scheduled, for as long as you set, and then hands the channel back by itself. Nothing is edited, so nothing has to be put back. Also the one job it must never be given.
Many screens
Many screens showing the same thing, changed in one edit, the way a channel works.
Two routes. A splitter sends one source's pixels down a cable to every screen wired to it. A channel lets every screen be online on its own and read the same feed. When each one is right, and how to do the second one.
Signage splits into two architectures: push a playlist to each device and let it play from local storage, or let the screen listen and work out what to draw as it goes. Here is what each one costs you, and where the other one wins.
Every other name in this category is about the screen. This one is about the feed, and the difference is not branding. Here is what changes when a channel is the thing you manage instead of a list of devices.
An estate is structured once and then it is boring. One channel per role instead of one per screen, every screen tuned to the channel for its job, and the whole thing watched from one board. Plus the limits an estate buyer should check before committing.
Design
What gets read from across a room, and what people walk straight past.
There is a number for this and you can get it with a tape measure. The sign trade's rule of thumb converted into the one figure you actually type into a slide, plus the checks that decide whether the board reads from the door.
How many slides should a digital sign have? Work it out from the loop, not from taste. Three slides at eight seconds each comes round in 24 seconds. Thirty takes four minutes, and most of it is never seen.
The first board you style by hand comes out fine. The fifth one, made in a hurry, is the one that looks like a different company. A brand kit is the record that stops that, and the reason it is worth the ten minutes is that every AI-built show is drafted from it.
Most codes on a screen go unscanned for three physical reasons: they are too small for the distance, they are not up long enough, and nothing says what scanning gets you. Here is the sizing arithmetic and the fix for each.
Troubleshooting
The four things that actually go wrong, what each one looks like, and the fix.
Nothing on screen tells you which of three things went wrong. Six checks from the outside in, starting with whether the screen is online at all and ending with the one button that forces a reload.
A screen that is already playing carries on. A screen that has to restart while the line is down cannot. Here is exactly which half you lose, how to test it in ten minutes, and when to buy a player box instead.
Three separate things have to go right before a board comes back on its own: the panel takes power, the player comes to the front, and the network returns. Only the middle one is ours. Here is how to set up all three and how to test it in ten minutes.
The board is upright, readable and sitting in a band across the middle with black above and below it. Nothing is broken. The bars tell you which of the two shapes is wrong, and there are exactly two ways out: turn the screen, or rebuild the show.
Open the player on a TV, scan the code from your phone, and put a show on it. Lesson one takes about as long as this paragraph.
Free screens show a ChannelOS banner, and about every 2 minutes it opens into a full ChannelOS slide; any paid plan removes both.
Sell it instead of buying it. The ChannelOS partner program pays 20% of what each business you refer pays us for their first 12 months, then 10% for as long as they stay. Free to join, nothing to stock.
See the partner program →