Answers
First screen free forever · no card · nothing to install on the TV
Getting noticed from the pavement
For anyone with a shopfront, a counter or a window, and a TV that is currently switched off.
Put one thing in the window that changes. A printed board is read once by the people who pass daily and then stops being read at all, because it says the same thing on Tuesday that it said in March. A screen showing today's price, today's dish or today's class time is the same square metre of glass doing a different job. The cheapest version of this is a TV you already own running a web page.
Screens for a shopfront →Three or four slides, not thirty. What you sell today, what it costs, one photograph, and how to buy or book. Anything a passer-by cannot read in the four seconds they are in front of the glass is decoration. Hold each slide for 10 to 12 seconds. If you find yourself writing a paragraph, it belongs on the counter as a leaflet, not on the screen.
The numbers behind a readable board →Not always, and it is worth being honest about when it is not. A poster is brighter than a cheap TV in direct afternoon sun, it costs nothing to run, and it cannot go blank. A screen wins on exactly one axis: the thing on it can change without a trip to the printer. If you change what you say less than a few times a year, print is the right answer and you should keep printing.
Put each board on a schedule and let the screen switch itself. In ChannelOS a channel is a named feed with a real daily timeline that understands both the hour and the weekday, so a breakfast board can run to 11am, a lunch board to 4pm and an evening board after that, with a different layout on Sunday. Nobody has to be in the shop at the boundary. Scheduling is a paid feature and starts on the Solo plan.
How scheduling works →Yes, and people do run this as a small side business. The mechanics are ordinary: your show carries a slide for the tailor two doors down, you charge per month, and you change it from your phone when they send new copy. What makes it work or not is not the software, it is whether you can collect from five neighbours every month. Read the playbook before quoting anyone a price.
The screen-rental playbook →Work back from the furthest person who has to read it. The sign trade's rule is about 25mm of capital-letter height per 3 metres of viewing distance, roughly 8mm per metre. Capital height is about 70 per cent of the font size you type, so on a 55-inch 1080p screen an item name wants roughly 56px at 3 metres, 75px at 4 metres and 115px at 6 metres. Once type is that big, five to seven lines is all that fits.
The full size and contrast table →Yes, and a showroom is the easy case because the content barely changes: a loop of what you sell, the finishes or variants you stock, what is on offer this month, and the paperwork or finance options people always ask about. Build it once and edit the one slide that goes out of date. Photographs do most of the work here, so give each product a slide of its own rather than a grid, and keep the price large enough to read from across the floor.
Screens on a shop floor →The board people check every day
Coaching classes, gyms and clinics, where the board is answering the same question at the counter all day.
Treat each notice as its own board. Batch timetable, admission dates, fee due dates, holiday notices and faculty are separate shows, and a channel decides which one is on the screen at which hour, so the timing change goes up between batches from a phone. Keep to what is already pinned on the wall: a student's name, marks or photo needs written permission from a parent before it goes on a screen.
In a browser, with no account. The free price list maker gives you nine templates (salon, barbershop, nail bar, spa, car wash, cleaning, tattoo, gym, or a plain services list), up to four price columns so a service can be priced short and long or by vehicle size, and a 1920x1080 image you can download without signing up. For a PRINTED A4 price list, Canva or Adobe Express has far more artwork and is the better tool. The reason to build it here is what happens afterwards: the same list can go on a screen and be changed from a phone.
Make one now, no sign-up →Open a web page on the screen and point it at your list. You open the player address in the browser the TV already has, scan the code it shows with your phone, and publish the list to it. Putting your prices up later is then one number typed on a phone rather than a redesign, a reprint and a trip round every room, and a service you are not offering this week can be struck through on the board without losing its price. There is no player box to buy, and the first screen is free, with a ChannelOS banner along the bottom that any paid plan removes.
Build the list first →Show only what you are already allowed to publish, and we would steer you off a results board entirely. A student's name, marks or photograph needs written parental permission first. Beyond that, Indian advertising rules require you to be able to substantiate a result claim before it goes up, and the board is in your own reception with your name on it. A batch, a syllabus and a timing carry none of that.
Yes, from a phone. A takeover puts one full-screen message over whatever is airing on every screen tuned to that channel, and clears back to the timetable when you end it. Read the limit plainly though: this is not a certified mass-notification system. There is no alarm feed, no bell or PA integration, and nothing fires automatically. A person has to send it. If you need alerting that runs without one, buy that.
Where Rise Vision wins in a school →Build it as a table, with time, class, studio and coach as columns, then give the morning, daytime and evening blocks their own hours on a channel so the screen carries the next block rather than the whole week. A live clock sits beside it. The timetable is typed and edited by you: nothing reads your booking system, so if the wall has to say how many spaces are left in the 18:30, buy the gym platform that owns the roster.
The gym screen, set up end to end →Put a takeover up from your phone. One full-screen notice goes over whatever is airing on every screen tuned to that channel, and it clears when the class is back on. Nothing in the timetable is edited, so there is nothing to put back afterwards. That is the exact failure of the whiteboard, which says the trainer is in until somebody walks over and rubs it out.
How a takeover works →The questions the front desk answers all day. Which doctors are in today, the timings, the services you offer, what to bring, where to go, and the standing notices the receptionist repeats. Put them on a rotation with a clock. Keep it operational: no patient name, photograph or case detail belongs on a screen in a public room, and we will not help you write a treatment claim.
What belongs on a waiting room TV, in full →There are two honest ways and neither of them is a queue system. Somebody at the desk types the current number onto the board, or you embed the web page your existing queue software already serves and the screen displays that. There is no token widget and nothing counts patients. If a live queue is the whole reason for the screen, buy the queue system first.
Why this is a slideshow and not a queue board →That is the one thing we say no to. Doctor availability, timings, the services you offer, directions, documents to bring and general health information are all fine and all useful. A treatment claim, a price promise on a procedure or a before-and-after photograph is a problem under Indian medical advertising rules, and that problem lands on your registration, not on us. We are not going to help publish one.
What not to put on a waiting room screen →Yes for the lobby or entrance board: service and prayer times, this week's notices, the events calendar, donation details and directions, changed from a phone by whoever is on duty. One screen is free for ever, which is usually all a foyer needs. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it. It is the wrong tool inside the hall during a service, because nobody can advance a slide on cue from the front of the room. For lyrics, liturgy and sermon slides use presentation software built for a live operator.
The lobby screen, and what we will not do →Yes, for anything general: warm-up and cool-down sequences, form reminders, equipment instructions, opening hours and aftercare advice, on a loop in the gym floor or the waiting area. Build each sequence as its own show and schedule which one is up at which hour. Two limits worth knowing. It cannot show a named patient's plan or appointment, because it reads from no system and a name on a wall is a privacy exposure. And it must not carry a treatment or recovery claim.
Promoting an offer or an event
Gyms, salons, clinics, schools, temples, churches and anyone running a thing on a date.
Use the screens that are already in the room and already switched on. A reception TV, a lobby screen and a corridor display can all carry the same three slides, and the cost of changing them the week before is nothing. This does not replace the poster on the noticeboard outside. It replaces the version of the poster that was already out of date the day it was pinned up.
Put the event on the same screens that carry the timetable, and give it its own window in the schedule so it appears in the run-up and disappears the morning after. Hallway boards work better when one person owns them and can change them from a phone between classes, which is the actual bottleneck in most schools, not the hardware.
Hallway boards without an IT project →Yes. A QR widget is built in: point it at your booking page, your ordering link or your UPI handle and it renders onto the slide at whatever size you place it. Keep it big and keep it still, because a code that shares a slide with moving text is hard to scan from across a room. One code per slide reads better than three.
The next thing that happens, and where. A running order with the current session highlighted answers the question almost everyone in the room is actually asking. Add a clock, because people check it constantly, and one QR to the schedule so they can stop asking the screen. Sponsor logos belong on their own slide in rotation rather than crowded into the corner of every other one.
Event board templates →Delete the slide, or schedule its end date when you build it so it retires itself. If you need the screen changed right now and cannot get to the edit, a live takeover puts a single message over everything that is airing, on one screen or all of them, until you clear it. Takeover and scheduling are paid features, from the Solo plan up.
You can, and you can also do better than that. Attaching the PDF lets the AI read it and lay the content out for a screen, which is a different shape from a page: landscape instead of portrait, five lines instead of fifty, readable from the back of the room. A PDF shown full-screen on a TV is legible from about a metre away and from nowhere else, which is usually not where anybody is standing.
The TV, the power and the wifi
The questions people ask before they will put anything on the wall.
A normal TV is fine for normal shop hours. Any set with a usable web browser works: Android TV, Google TV, webOS, Fire TV, a Chromebox, or a laptop in kiosk mode on the HDMI port. A commercial display earns its higher price in three cases and only three: the screen runs 16 to 24 hours a day, it faces direct sun, or it is mounted in portrait. For a shop open ten hours a day, the TV on the wall is the right hardware.
What makes a good signage TV →Not for ChannelOS, and here is the trade so you can judge it. We run in the TV's own browser, so there is nothing to buy, mount or licence per screen. A dedicated player box is genuinely more predictable than a five-year-old TV's browser, and it keeps playing through a dead internet line because the media is on local storage. If offline resilience across many sites is your deciding factor, buy the box. That is what it is for.
When a player box earns its cost →On an OLED panel it can, and static menu boards are the worst case for that panel type: a fixed logo and price column held in the same pixels for hours. LED, LCD and QLED sets are far more forgiving, and are what most shops already own. If OLED is what is on your wall, keep the show moving: more slides, shorter dwell, layouts that shift between them rather than one board parked all day.
Read the label on the back and do the arithmetic yourself, because it varies by four times across panels. Take the rated watts, multiply by hours per day, divide by 1000 for units, and multiply by your tariff. A 100W set for 10 hours is one unit a day. We do not publish a figure for this, because your panel, your brightness setting and your tariff decide it and none of those are ours.
A board already loaded on the screen keeps playing. It runs its slides from a clock it has already synced, so it holds its place and picks the schedule back up when the line returns. What it cannot do is collect an edit you made while the line was down, or start from cold: a screen that loses power and reboots with no internet will sit waiting for the connection. If your line dies for hours at a time, that is the case for a player box with local storage.
No. Most sets have a built-in on and off timer, and using it is the right call: it saves the panel hours and it saves the power. The board comes back to whatever the schedule says when the TV wakes, because the screen is told what to show rather than holding a file. Consumer TVs are typically warranted for about six to eight hours a day of use, which is worth knowing before you leave one running to midnight every day.
On the screen itself, under "How it is mounted". You get four choices rather than a portrait switch: Upright, Turned left, Turned right, and Upside down. Pick the one matching how the set is actually hung, and the picture turns to sit the right way up. The helper line under it is the whole rule: turn this to match the TV, not the content. Portrait or landscape is then worked out for you and shown on the screen's card.
Almost certainly Turned left against Turned right, which are the two that look identical until the board is on the wall. Stand in front of the set and find its top edge, the one that would be up if it were hanging normally. Top edge on the left is Turned left. Top edge on the right is Turned right. Change it on the screen and the TV turns immediately, with nothing to reload and nobody needing to touch the television.
It still plays, with black bars, and the bars go where the mismatch is. A portrait show on an upright 1920x1080 TV plays as a column down the middle using about a third of the panel, with bars at the sides. Turn the same TV a quarter and that show fills it edge to edge. A landscape show on a turned TV gets bars top and bottom. Nothing is cropped and nothing is stretched, so a mismatch costs you screen area rather than the board.
Sizes, resolutions and safe margins →Running it on an Android TV
For the set, box or stick you already own, and what the screen does at six in the morning with nobody in the room.
Yes. The app is tv.channelos.player, built for Android TV and Google TV on Android 8.0 or newer. It is not on Google Play yet, so you download it from our own site (type channelos.tv/tv.apk on the TV) and install it yourself. You do not need it: play.channelos.tv in the browser the TV already has runs the same player with nothing to install, and shows, schedules and pairing are identical either way.
Get the Android TV app →It does four things a browser tab cannot, and the board it plays is identical. It tries to open when the TV powers on, holds the screen awake, retries by itself after a failed load, and puts a menu on the remote that opens even when the board is blank. That menu is drawn by the app rather than the page, which is the whole reason it exists. Boot start is best effort: Android restricts apps that start themselves and TV makers enforce that differently.
The browser and the app, side by side →Yes, once you pick ChannelOS as the TV's home app. The toggle in the remote menu makes the app eligible and then sends you to the TV's own home-app picker, where you choose it. After that the set opens the board itself and BACK never drops out to a launcher. The same toggle reverses it, and there is no device lock, no pinning and no enrolment, so nothing here can hold a set against its owner.
It tries, and it works on a lot of TVs. The app listens for the boot broadcast and opens the board, with that switch on by default. Android restricts apps that start themselves and TV makers enforce that differently, so we call it best effort rather than a promise, and we cannot tell you in advance which yours is. Kiosk mode is the one that always holds, because then the system launches its own home app.
Press BACK, MENU or INFO, or hold OK, and a menu opens over the board. It is drawn by the app, not the page, so it still opens when the board is blank. From it you can reload, clear the cache, re-pair the screen, remove it from your account, open the TV's own wifi settings, and read a Screen info page written to be read out loud on a call.
Probably, and the age of the box is rarely what stops you. What decides it is the browser engine inside, not the processor. The app itself needs Android 8.0 or later and the release build is under 200 KB. It is not on Google Play yet, so it is a download from our site (channelos.tv/tv.apk), or you skip it and open play.channelos.tv in the box's own browser. If that engine is too old to size a board and cannot be updated, a current stick costs less than an afternoon of trying.
The case for a dedicated player →Three permissions: internet, network state, and permission to start after a reboot. No location, no camera, no microphone, no storage. It can only load our player, because any address handed to it is checked against an allowlist, so it cannot be pointed at another site. The native app carries no analytics of its own. The player page it loads runs the same product analytics as the site, including session recording, so treat the screen as recorded and keep anything private off it.
What we store and why →What it costs
Every number here comes from the billing catalogue that checkout actually charges.
Your first screen is free forever, with no card and no countdown, and it does not flip to paid when you add more. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it. Screens after that are $6 per screen per month, or $5 per screen if you pay yearly. Pro is $10 monthly and $8 yearly. Agency, for 25 or more screens, is $250 a month or $200 a month paid yearly with 25 screens included, then $7.50 per extra screen per month, or $6 paid yearly. Those are the prices everywhere: ChannelOS is sold in US dollars. Every plan, free included, carries a monthly AI-credit pool: 50 on free, 150 on Solo, 400 on Pro, and 1,500 pooled on Agency.
The full plan table →The number you see is the number charged. Nothing is added at checkout, and the amount on the pricing page is the amount that reaches your card. Billing is in US dollars by card, through Razorpay, charged in advance for the period, and it renews until you cancel it yourself in the app.
Failed, duplicate and erroneous charges are refunded in full, to the original payment method, normally processed within 5 to 7 business days. How long it then takes to appear is your bank's, not ours. Because a period is charged in advance, cancelling part way through it does not create a pro-rata refund: the period you paid for runs to its end and does not renew. Your free screen is never charged, so there is nothing to refund on it. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it.
The full cancellation and refund policy →Free is one screen, one seat, no card, and 50 AI credits a month. That is a permanent plan, not a trial. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it. What free does not include: channels and scheduling by hour and weekday, live takeover, and one-tap background removal, which all start on Solo, and brand kits, which start on Pro. Export is free on every plan, so you can take your shows and channels out as a file whether or not you ever pay.
What is really free in this category →Per screen. A screen is one TV showing one board, so two TVs in one shop is two screens and the first one is free. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it. There is no site licence and no per-location fee, and there is no separate charge for a player device because there is no player device. If you run several branches from one login, they can all sit in the same workspace on the same schedule.
Who is behind it, and who fixes it
The questions people ask last and decide on first.
You can do it yourself in a few minutes, and if you would rather not, message us on WhatsApp at +91 81608 66724 and we will walk you through it step by step while you are standing in front of the TV. If you are in Ahmedabad, ask and we will come and do it. Setting up digital tools is the number one difficulty Indian small businesses report, so this is a fair thing to ask before you start, not after.
Ask a person →James Christian, working from Ahmedabad, India. It is a small operation rather than a company with a support department, which is a real trade: you get the person who wrote the code answering your email, and you do not get a 24-hour phone line. The business is a sole proprietorship and the legal, refund and privacy terms are all published rather than summarised.
Who builds this →Not that we can point you at yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. There is no customer name, quote, logo or count anywhere on this site, because inventing one is the single fastest way to deserve none. What we can say is checkable: the first screen is free, export works on the free plan, and you can run one real board on one real TV for a week before you decide anything. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it.
A person, and it is a small team, so you get the founder rather than a ticket queue. Email [email protected] or message WhatsApp on +91 81608 66724. We answer within two business days and usually the same day. Paid plans get email support, and Pro and Agency go to the front of the queue. There is no published uptime figure and no status page yet, which is worth knowing.
Card details never touch our servers. They go straight to Razorpay's PCI-DSS systems, and we keep only the transaction record needed to bill you, refund you and file our accounts. What we do hold is your account, your shows and the media you upload. The published privacy policy names what is collected, why, who it is shared with, how long it is kept and how to have it deleted. A screen showing a board needs no login, so a paired TV holds nothing worth stealing.
The privacy policy →Yes, on any plan including free. Any show or channel exports to one self-contained file carrying its slides and its media, and imports back into any ChannelOS workspace. That is deliberately not gated, because a free plan you cannot leave is not free. Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it. It will not import into a competitor's product, so it is portability of your work rather than of your setup.
How export and import work →Send it. Email [email protected] or use the contact page. A question asked twice ends up on this page, so asking it is doing the next person a favour.
Prices and allowances live on pricing, the whole model is in how ChannelOS works, and this page has a plain markdown twin if you are a machine.
That is the test: put it on one TV, change something on a busy day, and see whether the board is still right three weeks later. It costs nothing to run.
Free screens show a ChannelOS banner along the bottom of the screen, and any paid plan removes it.
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 →