# Your first show: one sentence in, then the three edits every draft needs > 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. Source: https://channelos.tv/academy/your-first-show Published: 2026-10-29 Track: Get something on the screen today Lesson 4 of 4 Plan: Free plan Time: about 5 minutes Author: The ChannelOS team **To make a slideshow for a TV, write one sentence naming the business, the three things it sells with their prices, and the one action you want from whoever reads it. AI drafts the slides in about a minute and hands back an editable show. Then do the three edits every draft needs: check every price against your own till, swap the stock photograph for one of your own, and cut each slide down to one idea.** --- ## The short version, in 6 steps 1. Click New show, pick the shape your TV is actually mounted in, then press Start building. 2. Open the AI chat and write one sentence naming the business, the three things it sells with their prices, and the one action you want. 3. Send it and wait about a minute while the slides appear on the canvas. 4. Read every price off the slide against your own till and correct the ones that are wrong. 5. Replace the stock photograph with one picture of your own counter. 6. Cut each slide down to one idea: a heading, a number, nothing else. --- The prompt box is open, the cursor is blinking, and the sentence that comes easiest is some version of "a nice slideshow for my shop". What comes back is a slideshow for a shop: three slides about quality and service, a photograph of somebody else's tidier premises, and not one of your prices. The box is not the problem. The sentence is, and it takes about fifteen seconds to fix. **Name the business, the three things it sells with their prices, and the one action you want from whoever reads it.** That is the whole sentence. Send it, wait about a minute, then do the three edits every draft needs: correct a price, replace a stock photo, cut a slide that says too much. The speed of the drafting is already covered in [AI slideshow generation](/blog/ai-slideshow-generation-fast); this lesson is the five minutes after it, which is the part that decides whether the board is any good. ## What should I put on a digital sign? The thing you sell, what it costs, and what you want the reader to do about it. That sounds obvious until you look at what actually goes up on a new screen: a welcome message, a logo on a loop, the opening hours. None of those earn their place: the hours are already on the door, the logo on the sign above it, and a customer standing in front of the screen does not need welcoming, because they are already inside. Take a bike repair shop. Three things it sells: a tune-up at $35, a full service at $75, a puncture repaired while you wait at $15. One action: scan the code to book a slot this week. That is a board. Everything else is decoration you will have to maintain. ## What do I type into the prompt box? 1. Click **New show**. The empty board asks **What shape is your screen?** before anything else: choose **Landscape** or **Portrait** to match the way your TV is actually mounted, then press **Start building**. Nothing can be added to the show until that is answered, and answering it now costs nothing because there are no slides yet to re-place. This is the show's own shape, not the screen's rotation setting, which is a separate control in the operator app. Mixing the two up is the usual reason [a board comes out sideways](/academy/fix-a-sideways-board). 2. The board now says **Start with AI**. On a laptop the **AI chat** is the left rail and it is already open; on a phone it is the first entry of the bottom bar. The brand-kit chip reads **No brand kit** and stays there on the free plan, because brand kits start on the Pro plan: the draft arrives in a neutral style and you set the colours by hand. 3. Type the sentence. For the bike shop: *"A board for a neighbourhood bike repair shop. Three services: tune-up $35, full service $75, puncture repair while you wait $15. One action: scan the code to book a slot this week."* 4. Send it. The slides appear on the canvas as it works, so you can read the draft while it is still building. ![The AI chat in the ChannelOS editor, ready to take a description of the show](/shots/flow-ai-create.webp) The difference between that sentence and "a nice slideshow for my bike shop" is three pieces of information the model cannot guess: the trade, the numbers, and the ask. Give it those and it has nothing left to invent. Leave them out and it invents all three, confidently. ## What does the first draft get wrong? Almost always the same three things, in the same order of how much they cost you. **A price.** If you put the numbers in the sentence, the draft usually keeps them. If you did not, it writes plausible ones, and plausible is the dangerous word: $4.50 for a coffee looks completely right and is not your price. Click the price, type the real number. This is the only edit here that costs you money if you skip it, so do it first and read every digit off the slide against your own till rather than from memory. **A photograph.** The draft pulls free Pexels stock, which means a bike shop gets a picture of a different bike shop, shot in better light, with a floor nobody has worked on. One photograph of your own counter does the one thing stock cannot: it shows the room the reader is standing in. On the free plan you get one custom image up to 500 KB, which is exactly one good photograph: Pexels stock and AI-generated images do not count against it, so the rest of the show can still come from the library. **A slide that says too much.** The model writes like a web page, because web pages are what it read. A slide gets a few seconds of attention from someone standing up and doing something else, so it carries one idea: a heading, a number, and nothing underneath. Delete the supporting sentence. If you cannot bring yourself to delete it, it belongs on a different slide, which usually means it does not belong at all. [How big the text has to be](/academy/how-big-the-text-has-to-be) has the arithmetic for the heading itself. ## How many slides should it have, and how long does each one hold? Three slides, eight to ten seconds each. The free plan caps a show at three slides, and it is worth saying plainly that this is the right number anyway rather than a limit you are working around. A loop is read standing up by somebody who is mid-queue, so the fourth slide is the one nobody ever reaches. [Three slides, not thirty](/academy/three-slides-not-thirty) makes the case properly. Three slides at eight seconds is a twenty-four second loop, which means a customer waiting a minute sees the whole thing twice. The hold is per slide, set in the editor, so a dense slide can run longer than a simple one. The free plan also holds two shows in total, which is enough for a weekday board and a weekend board. One thing to know before you put a free screen on a wall a customer can see: a free screen carries a ChannelOS banner along the bottom, and about every two minutes that banner opens into a full ChannelOS slide for roughly thirty seconds naming what ChannelOS is and the channelos.tv address, then folds back. That is what pays for the free screen. Any paid plan removes both. ## When should I not let the AI write it? Three cases where typing a sentence is slower than not typing one. **The thing you sell is a forty-item menu.** A draft that has to invent forty names and forty prices hands you forty things to check, which takes longer than typing them did. Put a long list in a table or the menu widget and type it once. [Digital menu board design](/blog/digital-menu-board-design) has the arithmetic for how many items fit on one screen before you start, which is usually fewer than you think. **You are re-rolling the prompt.** Every draft spends AI credits, and the free monthly pool is 50. Generating the same board ten times to see if the tenth one lands is a real cost, where moving a heading on the canvas in front of you is free. Once a draft is roughly right, edit it; do not regenerate it. **The board never changes.** If what you want is one fixed list of three services that will read the same in a year, a printed poster costs nothing to run, needs no wifi and cannot go blank. The reason to put it on a screen is that you intend to change it. If you do not, keep the poster. ## What happens to this show next? You have a show. If you [paired a screen](/academy/pair-your-first-screen) in the last lesson it is already playing, and the next decision is whether it just plays or runs to a timetable. A weekday board at nine and a different one at five is [scheduling it onto a channel](/academy/schedule-what-airs-and-when), which is where a slideshow turns into a screen that runs itself. Channels and scheduling are not on the free plan, though: they start on Solo, at $5 per screen per month billed annually. ## Frequently asked questions ### What should I put on a digital sign? The thing you sell, what it costs, and what you want the reader to do about it. Three items with a price each and one action is a complete board. Leave off the welcome message, the logo on a loop and your opening hours: the hours are already on the door, and a customer standing in front of the screen knows where they are. ### How many slides should a digital sign have? Three is usually right, and the ChannelOS free plan caps a show at three slides for that reason. A loop is read standing up, by somebody doing something else, so the fourth slide is the one nobody reaches. If you genuinely have more to say, that is a second show on a schedule rather than a longer loop. ### How long should each slide stay up? Eight to ten seconds for a slide with a heading and a number, longer if the slide carries a list someone has to read down. Three slides at eight seconds is a twenty-four second loop, so anybody waiting a minute in a queue sees the whole thing twice. You set the hold per slide in the editor, so a dense slide can run longer than a simple one. ### Can I use my own photos? Yes. The free plan holds one custom image up to 500 KB plus one custom video up to 20 MB or 10 seconds, which is exactly one good photograph of your own counter. Free Pexels photos and videos do not count against that, and neither do AI-generated images, so you can fill the rest of the show from the built-in library. ### Do I need a designer? Not to get something readable on a screen. The AI draft is a first pass and the three edits in this lesson are the review it needs. What a designer gives you that a draft does not is a look that is specifically yours rather than a neutral one, which in ChannelOS is a brand kit, and brand kits start on the Pro plan. ## Next lesson [Portrait digital signage, end to end: four decisions in the order you hit them](https://channelos.tv/academy/portrait-digital-signage) ## Further reading - https://channelos.tv/blog/ai-slideshow-generation-fast - https://channelos.tv/blog/create-show-schedule-channel-pair-screen - https://channelos.tv/blog/digital-menu-board-design The whole curriculum: https://channelos.tv/academy and https://channelos.tv/academy.md