What happens when the wifi drops (and what does not come back)

The broadband went out at ten past two. The card machine noticed first, then somebody looked up at the TV above the counter and asked whether the board was still on. It was. The harder version of that question is the one that usually arrives before anyone has bought anything, often straight off a rival’s comparison page where “works offline” is the headline feature: what if it is still down in an hour, and what if the power goes with it?

A screen that is already playing keeps playing when the wifi drops. A screen that has to start, or restart, while the connection is down cannot come back until it is back. Everything below is those two sentences with the detail filled in, including the case where the honest answer is to buy somebody else’s hardware.

Does the board keep playing when the wifi drops?

Yes, and not by accident. The show is already in the page, and the pictures and video clips in it are held in the browser’s own storage rather than fetched again on every loop. So a connection that drops out for five minutes, or that wobbles all afternoon, is not a black screen and not a stutter between slides. The board carries on cycling exactly as it was.

This is the part people assume cannot be true of a web page, and it is worth testing rather than believing, which is what the four steps above are for. Pull the router out and watch. It costs ten minutes and it settles the question for your own site rather than in general.

What stops working while the line is down?

The live half, which is all of it:

• An edit will not arrive. Change a price on your phone and the TV will go on showing the old one until the connection returns.
• A schedule change will not arrive, and a daypart changeover due mid-outage is not something to count on either. What a screen shows is worked out from your show and your channel in real time, which is the thing that makes a realtime player useful on every other day of the year and is also what it costs you here. Scheduling starts on the Solo plan, so on the free plan this is a row you cannot hit: you pushed a show straight to the screen and there is no timeline to miss a changeover on.
• Controls from the Display Board will not land. Play, pause, blank, mute and next all have to reach the screen to do anything, and so does a takeover, which starts on the Pro plan.

None of that is silent. You will see it as a screen that has stopped answering, so the first thing worth checking when an edit does not land is whether the line is up, before anyone goes near the mount.

What happens if the power goes off as well?

This is the case that actually matters, and it is worth drawing as four combinations rather than one.

	Connection up	Connection down
Screen stays on	Normal. Edits land in seconds.	Keeps playing. The live half waits.
Screen restarts	Comes back by itself, no pairing.	Waits. It cannot fetch the show.

Three of the four are fine. One is not, and it is specific: the television restarting at a moment when the connection is not there. The page and the show are fetched fresh every time a screen starts, so there is nothing to start from.

Note that a restart is not only a power cut. A standby timer, somebody switching input to watch something and switching back, or a set that reboots itself for a firmware update all land in the same row. Getting a screen back by itself after a power cut is the lesson for the half of this that is about the television rather than the line.

How bad is this in practice?

Worth being specific, because the worst case and the usual case are very far apart.

In a shop or a cafe the power and the internet tend to fail together, because the router is plugged into the same wall, and a cut tends to be minutes rather than days. Treat that as a rule of thumb and check it against your own building rather than against ours, because your own history of outages is the only evidence worth anything here. Where it holds, nothing on this page is a problem: either the screen stayed on and kept playing, or everything in the building went off and came back inside the hour and so did the board.

The case that bites is the long one, or the unattended one. A site where the line goes for an afternoon. A screen in a room nobody walks into. A unit on a connection that was never reliable to begin with. The cost there is not a slow update, it is a dark screen for as long as the outage lasts.

What can I actually do about it?

Three things, and two of them are not our product, which is the point.

1. Put a small uninterruptible power supply on the television and the router. A screen that never lost power never has to restart, and the whole problem row above disappears. They are sold for desktop computers, and sizing one is arithmetic: the watts on the back of the panel against the minutes you want to cover.
2. Give the router a mobile backup. Plenty of business routers fail over to 4G or 5G automatically, and some will do it from a phone tethered in an emergency. That covers the fetch, which is the only thing a restarting screen is waiting for.
3. On Android TV, use the app rather than the browser tab. Our Android TV app retries a failed load by itself and reloads the moment the network comes back, so a set that returns on its own does not need a person with a remote. For the starting half, set it as the TV’s home app: the system launches the home app after boot, which is the only auto-start that holds reliably. There is also a start-when-the-TV-powers-on setting, but treat it as best effort, because Android restricts starting an app from the background and TV builds disagree about how strictly. The app stores nothing for offline playback, so it does not change the row above. It is a direct download from our own site rather than a Play Store install, and it needs Android 8.0 or newer.

Should I buy a media player box instead?

If a screen has to survive a long outage entirely on its own, buy a vendor who sells a media player with local storage. Not as a hedge, as a straight recommendation. A player box keeps your content on its own disk and comes back with no network at all, and for a factory floor, a basement, a rural forecourt or any site where the connection is genuinely unreliable, that one difference outweighs everything else in the comparison. Whether you need a player box lays out the four situations where the hardware earns its price.

That is a real reason to spend money on hardware, and we are not going to pretend the browser closes it. What we will say is that it is a narrower case than the marketing around it suggests, and that it is answerable with a router and a plug socket more often than with a purchase order.

So go and test it on your own screen before you decide. Pull the router out, watch the board for five minutes, then restart the TV while it is still unplugged and watch that too. Ten minutes gives you the real answer for your site, and the first screen is free for ever if you want to try it before any of this matters. Free screens carry a ChannelOS banner along the bottom, and about every 2 minutes it opens into a full ChannelOS slide for about 30 seconds before folding back. Any paid plan removes both.