Menu boards

Digital menu boards on the TV you already own.

Digital menu boards used to mean buying a player box per screen, mounting it out of sight, and licensing it forever. This one is a web page: open the browser your TV already has, pair it from your phone, and change a price from wherever you're standing.
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First screen free forever · no card · no player box to buy

What a menu board looks like on the TV.

Three real boards, drawn by the same renderer your screen runs. Prices, sections and all.

These are our own sample venues, not customers. We have not put words in anyone's mouth: the boards are real product output, the businesses are made up, and we will say so until there are real ones here to name. Type your own menu and watch this happen →

People run ChannelOS screens in cafés and restaurants, gyms and studios, clinics and waiting rooms, schools and colleges, events, hotels and shops. One TV or one standee is enough to start.

Two screens, two shapes, one place to change them. A TV on the wall, a standee by the counter. Each one is its own channel.

A café board on a TV, showing cutting chai, coffee and hot bitesA dental clinic waiting-room board on a TV, telling patients to check in at the front deskA gym board on a TV, showing the studio name and its personal-training lineA school board on a TV, showing that enrolment is open for the coming yearA festival board on a TV, showing three stages, two nights, the dates and the gate timeA boutique hotel welcome board on a TV
Tapri
Pouring today
Kadak Chai
₹20
Filter Coffee · ₹40
Bun Maska · ₹30
Counter open till 11 pm

For cafés · The drink list, with today's prices. Change one at the counter and the board changes.

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The definition

What a digital menu board is

A digital menu board is a menu shown on a TV screen instead of a printed panel. The sections, dishes and prices live in a file you edit from a browser, and the screen re-reads that file — so changing a price is an edit, not a reprint. Because the screen is being told what to show rather than holding a fixed image, one TV can carry a breakfast board, a lunch board and an evening board without anyone touching it.

That leaves three parts to get right, and only three. There's the screen — almost always a TV that's already on the wall. There's the board itself, meaning the design and the numbers on it. And there's the thing that decides what's on that screen right now, which is the part every printed board and every exported PNG is missing. The rest of this page is those three, in order.

A fair word about the alternatives: a printed panel never crashes, never loses Wi-Fi and costs nothing to run, and for a menu that genuinely doesn't move it is still the right answer. A design tool like Canva will give you a beautiful menu file and stop there — getting it onto a TV, and keeping it right at 5pm, is left to you. The case for a screen is entirely about how often the numbers change.

Part one · the screen

Why the TV you own is enough

No box · no APK

It runs in the browser the TV already has.

Menu-board vendors sell player hardware because a player is a thing that can be licensed per device, and in fairness a dedicated player is more predictable than a five-year-old TV's browser — that's a real engineering argument, not a scam. The trade is that you buy one per screen, mount it, and own it forever. ChannelOS takes the other side of that trade: the screen opens a URL, and that's the entire installation.
  • Android TV, Google TV, webOS and Fire TV — the built-in browser, nothing sideloaded
  • A Chromebox, or a laptop in kiosk mode on the HDMI port, behaves identically
  • Pair the screen from your phone — no per-device licence, no enrolment console
  • Nothing to mount behind the panel, and nothing to replace when a box dies
A menu board playing full-screen on a paired TV

Part two · the board

Change a price once, across every board

Edit once · airs everywhere

No publish step, no walking over to the TV.

What a screen is showing is derived from the schedule in real time, so there is no publish-and-wait step between your edit and the wall. The first draft doesn't have to be yours either — describe the place and the menu in one sentence and the AI builds a complete, on-brand, multi-slide board you then edit; it can read a PDF menu, a photo or a webpage for context. If you'd rather start from something finished, the template gallery is full of real, editable boards.
  • Edit from a phone or a laptop — the screens follow, there's no sync to wait on
  • Ten screens on the same channel change together, in one edit
  • Describe the board in a sentence and AI drafts the whole thing, editable
  • Canva-style editor: free Pexels photos and video, background removal, tables, live widgets
app.channelos.tv/shows/·/edit
A menu board open in the ChannelOS slide editor with an element selected

Part three · what's on now

Breakfast, lunch and dinner on one screen

Channels · dayparting

The board changes itself at eleven.

This is the part a printed panel and an exported image both give up on. Breakfast comes down at eleven whether or not anyone is free to change it, the evening board goes up at five, and the weekend runs its own plan. Every screen tuned to that channel follows the same clock, so a second location can't drift onto last month's prices.
  • A channel is a named feed with a real daily timeline, not a playlist
  • Schedule by hour and by weekday — a Saturday layout can differ from a Tuesday
  • Live takeover for the thing that can't wait: a sold-out line, a one-hour offer
  • Go live now when you'd rather not schedule anything at all
app.channelos.tv/channels/·
A channel's daily timeline with scheduled boards and a now playhead

Start here

Fourteen kitchens, fourteen starting points

A sushi counter and a barbecue pit do not have the same pricing problem, so they should not get the same board. Each of these opens the free menu board maker with a starter menu, a palette and the layout rules that kitchen actually needs — no account, no watermark.

Keep reading

Digital menu boards, in practice

Questions

Digital menu board questions

What is a digital menu board?
A digital menu board is a menu shown on a TV screen instead of a printed panel. The sections, dishes and prices live in a file you edit from a browser, and the screen re-reads that file, so changing a price is an edit rather than a reprint. Because the screen is being told what to show rather than holding a fixed image, the same TV can carry a breakfast board, a lunch board and an evening board on its own.
Do I need a media player or an Android box for a digital menu board?
Not with ChannelOS. The board runs in the browser already built into the screen — Android TV, Google TV, webOS, Fire TV, a Chromebox, or a laptop in kiosk mode on the HDMI port. There is no per-device licence. Most menu-board vendors do sell a player, and a dedicated player is genuinely more predictable than a five-year-old TV's browser; the trade is that you buy, mount and eventually replace one per screen.
How much do digital menu boards cost?
The screen is usually a TV you already own, so the running cost is the software. With ChannelOS the first screen is free forever — no card — and screens after that are billed per screen per month; the current numbers are on the pricing page. What you should also price in with any vendor is the hardware: a player box per screen, plus its licence, is what makes most menu-board quotes larger than the software line suggests.
Can I show a different menu at breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Yes. A channel is a named feed with a real daily timeline, so you schedule the breakfast board to its hours, the lunch board to its hours, and the evening board to the rest, by hour and by weekday. The screen switches itself at the boundary. Nobody has to be in the shop at 11am to change it, and a weekend layout can differ from a weekday one.
How do I change a price on a digital menu board?
You open the board on your phone or laptop, edit the line, and stop. What a screen shows is derived from the schedule in real time, so there is no publish-and-wait sync step and no walking over to the TV. If ten screens are tuned to the same channel, all ten change together — which is the whole reason a chain moves off printed panels.
Can I make a digital menu board for free?
Yes. The free menu board maker builds one in your browser and downloads a 1920×1080 PNG without an account or a card, in fourteen cuisine styles. A free ChannelOS account adds the part a design file cannot do: putting the board on an actual TV and changing it after it is live.

When a box is the right answer

A screen that is already playing keeps playing if the wifi drops, but it needs the connection back to come up again after a power cut, because nothing is cached on the television itself. If a screen has to survive a long outage entirely on its own, buy a player from a company that sells one and ask them about local storage. That is a real reason to pay for hardware. Ours is not one of them.

Screen limits, AI allowances and the per-screen price all live on the pricing page. The first screen is free forever, with no card. The questions that come up after that one, about power, burn-in, what happens when the wifi drops and who sets it up, are answered on the answers page.

Put the menu on the TV tonight.

Open a link on the screen, pair it from your phone, and change the prices from anywhere.

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