For branches
A rate changes and somebody has to get the new figure onto screens in nineteen branches before opening. The printed rate card is the honest version of this problem: it is accurate on the day it was printed and slowly stops being true.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Change the figure once on the board and every branch tuned to that channel shows it. The number stops being nineteen separate jobs.
Bank holidays, a half day, a branch closed for works. Scheduled onto the dates it applies to, so nobody is taking a sign down.
What a teller can help with, what needs an appointment, what can be done in the app. The questions a queue asks, answered while it waits.
A separate channel for the things customers should not read, on the same account and the same hardware.
How it is different
Every one of these is a mechanism rather than a promise, so you can confirm each of them on a free screen before you pay for anything.
A paired screen holds a connection and derives what it shows from the schedule in real time. Change the board and the screens follow in seconds. There is no publish step, no playlist to re-download and no interval to tune.
Not a playlist. A channel is a named feed with a daily and weekly plan plus date-scoped overrides, so a board can hold Tuesday afternoons, a campaign can own one fortnight, and a screen tuned in follows its own clock all year without anyone touching it.
Below a laptop width the whole editor swaps chrome rather than shrinking: a bottom tool bar, a selection bar that navigates as a menu stack, and the deck one tap from the slide counter. Fixing a wrong price from the shop floor is the normal way to use it.
Describe the board in a sentence, or hand over the PDF you already print from, and the assistant drafts a real editable show. It stays available to reword, restyle or rebuild a slide by chat, and the same assistant answers product questions in the app.
Android TV, Google TV, webOS, Fire TV, a Chromebox or a laptop in kiosk mode, paired by scanning a code with your phone. There is a native Android TV app too, downloaded as an APK from our own site rather than from Google Play. No media player box, no per-device licence, nothing to sideload.
Nothing to install, in the normal case: open the player URL in the screen's own browser and scan the code with your phone. If you would rather install an app, the native Android TV app is a free download from our own site rather than from Google Play, and a screen running it is on exactly the same plan as a screen running the browser.
When to buy something else
ChannelOS is not a queue-management system and has no ticketing, counter-calling or now-serving capability, so if the screen's job is calling numbers to counters, buy a product built for that. It also has no core-banking or rate-feed integration: a rate on a ChannelOS screen is a figure a person typed, not one pulled from a system of record, and for a regulated rate board some institutions will not accept that. There is no formal approval workflow either, so a two-person sign-off before a customer-facing figure goes live is a process you would run outside ChannelOS. Where it fits is the branch that wants its screens current and consistent and is content for a marketing or operations person to be the one who changes them.
Questions
More of these on Answers, which covers cost, hardware and what happens when the wifi drops.
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.
Keep reading
The board a visitor reads while they wait, and what belongs on it.
How nineteen branches become one edit.
Services down the left, up to four columns across. Free, no account, 1920x1080 PNG.
Taking every screen over at once for an announcement, then handing them back.
Pair a screen, put a board on it, and see whether the mechanism above holds before you pay for anything. The first screen is free forever.
Pricing shows what a second screen costs and what the free one leaves out.
Free screens show a ChannelOS banner, and about every 2 minutes it opens into a full ChannelOS slide; any paid plan removes both.
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 →