# My board came out sideways. Which of the four settings is wrong?

> 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.

Source: https://channelos.tv/academy/fix-a-sideways-board
Published: 2026-10-29
Track: Portrait, and the sideways TV
Lesson 4 of 4
Plan: Free plan
Time: about 2 minutes
Author: The ChannelOS team

**To rotate a sideways board, open Screens in ChannelOS, pick that screen, and under How it is mounted choose one of four quarter turns: Upright, Turned left, Upside down, Turned right. It rotates the picture without changing the show, and it reaches the TV in seconds. Four different faults produce a board that looks wrong, so name the symptom first: a page lying on its side is the rotation, black bars are the show's shape.**

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## The short version, in 5 steps

1. Stand back from the TV and name what you see: a page on its side, a page upside down, or an upright board with black bars.
2. Open Screens in ChannelOS and pick the screen that is wrong.
3. On its Device card, under How it is mounted, pick the quarter turn that matches the TV's top edge as it hangs now.
4. Look back at the TV and check it has turned, which takes a few seconds and needs no republish and no remote.
5. Treat black bars on a now-upright board as a shape mismatch rather than a rotation fault, and change the show instead.

---

The bracket is level. You checked it twice. The TV is on, the board has come up, and the prices are reading bottom to top like the spine of a book on a shelf. The temptation now is to take the set back off the wall, or to open the editor and start turning slides around inside it.

Do neither. Stand back and name what you can actually see, because **four different faults produce a board that looks wrong, and they do not look the same as each other.** Two of them are one setting in ChannelOS that takes ten seconds to change from your phone. One is the show rather than the screen. The fourth is in the television's own menu, and it is the one that makes every change you then make in software land somewhere else that is also wrong.

## How do I rotate my TV screen 90 degrees?

Open **Screens**, pick the screen, and look on its **Device** card for the section headed **How it is mounted**. There are four buttons there rather than a portrait switch:

- **Upright**, the TV is the normal way up
- **Turned left**, the top of the TV is on the left
- **Upside down**, the TV is hung the other way up
- **Turned right**, the top of the TV is on the right

The helper line beside them is the whole rule: *turn this to match the TV, not the content.* You are describing a wall, not asking for a layout.

Two things follow, and both matter while you are diagnosing. It **turns the picture and does not touch the show**, so no slide is edited and nothing has to be put back afterwards. And the change is pushed to the player, so the set turns within a few seconds: no remote, and nobody walks over to the television while you are up a ladder holding it.

## Which of the four faults is mine?

Read the symptom off the wall, then act once. Trying all four in turn is how a board ends up upside down instead of sideways, with no record of which change did it.

| What you see on the wall | What is actually wrong | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| The whole page is on its side: headings run up the wall, and a free screen's ChannelOS banner runs up an edge too | The screen is still set to **Upright** while the panel is not | **Turned left** or **Turned right**, whichever matches the top edge |
| The page is the right way round but upside down | **Turned left** and **Turned right** are swapped. You are 180 degrees out | The other one of those two |
| The board is upright and readable, sitting in a band across the middle with black above and below it | Nothing about the rotation. It is already correct | The show. A 16:9 deck in a 9:16 frame |
| You changed the setting and it got worse, or the picture seems to have turned twice | The television has a picture rotation of its own, switched on | Put the TV's own setting back to normal first |

Only the first two are rotation faults. The third is a shape mismatch wearing a rotation costume: a board sitting in a band with bars round it looks wrong while being perfectly upright, and that symptom gets called sideways too. If that is your symptom, nothing here will help: [the show and the screen are different shapes](/academy/show-and-screen-different-shapes) is the page you want.

## How can I tell which it is from across the room?

There is a free plumb line on the glass, more reliable than squinting at your own slide.

**Everything the player draws turns together.** The rotation is applied to the whole page rather than to the board inside it, so a free screen's ChannelOS banner, the identify overlay and the slide counter all swing round with the picture. That is a reference that was never part of your design and so cannot have been laid out wrong:

- If the banner along the bottom is **running up one side of the panel**, the screen's rotation is wrong. Fix the mount.
- If the banner sits **upright along the bottom edge** and only your board looks wrong, the rotation is right and the fault is the show's shape or its layout.

A free screen carries that banner along the bottom. It rests there for about a minute, then opens out into a full ChannelOS slide for roughly 30 seconds naming what ChannelOS is and the channelos.tv address, then folds back down. That is what pays for the free screen. Any paid plan removes both and takes the plumb line with it. On a paid screen use the black bars instead: bars top and bottom on a portrait panel mean the frame is right and the deck is landscape.

## How do I flip a board that is upside down?

Pick the other one of the two sideways mounts. **Turned left** against **Turned right** is the easiest pair to get the wrong way round: the two look identical on a laptop and opposite on a wall, and nothing in the dashboard tells them apart until the picture is on the glass.

No phone and no measuring needed:

1. Find the TV's **top edge**: the one that would be up if the set were hanging normally, usually the edge opposite the feet and the one without the brand name on it.
2. Look at which side of the wall that edge is on **now**.
3. Top edge on the left is **Turned left**. Top edge on the right is **Turned right**.

That is why the labels talk about the top of the TV rather than about degrees. Degrees invite you to work out which way the picture needs to go, which is the wrong direction to reason in and is where the 180 comes from.

## Can the TV rotate the picture by itself?

Some can, and this is the fault worth knowing before it costs you an afternoon. Plenty of consumer televisions have none at all, while some Android TV boxes and some commercial panels do, usually in a display or developer menu. Once one is on, **both rotations apply and they add up**. A panel turned 90 degrees by its own firmware and then 90 degrees again by ChannelOS arrives upside down.

So set the television's own rotation back to normal and leave the turning to ChannelOS. Not because ours is better, but because the TV's setting is invisible from your phone: six months from now the only record of that quarter turn is in a menu on a set nobody can reach.

## When is rotating the screen the wrong answer?

Three cases where this control is not your answer.

**The show is the wrong shape.** Rotation changes the frame the player draws into and never what sits inside it. A 16:9 deck on a quarter-turned panel is a correct, upright, smaller board with bars above and below, and no amount of rotating improves it. ChannelOS does not swap in a shape-matched variant per screen either: a show is authored in one shape and every screen airing it gets that shape. The fix is [a show designed for a portrait screen](/academy/build-a-portrait-show).

**The bracket is not at a quarter turn.** Only 0, 90, 180 and 270 are accepted. A mount at a jaunty 20 degrees is a bracket problem, and any other value is refused rather than half turning the screen into something nobody chose.

**You are checking your work on the dashboard.** The preview beside each screen shows the **show's** shape, not the panel's turn: right for judging whether a board reads well, useless for judging whether a TV is upside down. The wall is the only honest check, and it is why this job takes two minutes.

## What if it is still wrong?

Change the one setting your symptom points at, then look at the wall. If it is still wrong it will be wrong in a different way, and the table above names that one too. The arithmetic for every mount and shape pairing, if you would rather check your answer before climbing down, is in [hanging the TV sideways and telling ChannelOS which way you turned it](/blog/portrait-digital-signage-tv).

## Frequently asked questions

### Why is my digital sign sideways?

Because the software has not been told which way the panel is hung. A television turned on its side still reports itself as 1920x1080, and the browser event that fires when you rotate a phone never fires for a wall bracket, so nothing can detect it. The player turns its output by the figure stored against that screen, and the default is no turn at all. Set it under Screens and the picture rights itself.

### How do I flip an upside down screen?

Pick the other one of the two sideways mounts. Upside down means you are 180 degrees out, which on a turned panel means Turned left and Turned right have been swapped. Stand in front of the set, find the edge that would be the top if it were hanging normally, and look at which side of the wall it is on now. Top edge on the left is Turned left. On the right is Turned right.

### Can the TV rotate the picture itself?

A few can. Plenty of consumer televisions have none at all, while some Android TV boxes and some commercial panels do, usually buried in a display or developer menu. If one is switched on, it and ChannelOS both turn the picture and the two add up, so a quarter turn in software can land you 180 degrees out. Put the set's own rotation back to normal and let ChannelOS do the turning.

### Does rotating the screen change my show?

No. They are two separate settings and that is the single commonest confusion here. The screen's rotation turns the whole picture the player draws and never edits a slide. The show's shape, 16:9 or 9:16, is chosen when the show is made and lives on the show. Rotating a screen cannot make a landscape deck fill a portrait panel, and changing a show's shape cannot correct a sideways mount.

### I changed the rotation and the TV did not move. Now what?

The corrected mount is pushed to the player, so a working screen turns within a few seconds without reloading. If nothing happened, the screen is probably not connected rather than not turned: check its status on the display board. A screen that has lost its connection keeps playing what it already had, which looks identical to a screen ignoring you.


## Next lesson

[How to schedule what airs and when, so nobody has to swap the board](https://channelos.tv/academy/schedule-what-airs-and-when)


## Further reading

- https://channelos.tv/blog/portrait-digital-signage-tv
- https://channelos.tv/blog/digital-signage-size-guide


The whole curriculum: https://channelos.tv/academy and https://channelos.tv/academy.md