For bars and pubs
Happy hour starts at five and the board behind the bar says it starts at five every hour of the day, including at eleven at night. A bar's screen is wrong in a specific way: it is right for two hours and misleading for the other ten.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
What is on, what it costs, what just changed. A guest keg goes up as an edit rather than a chalk rewrite.
Put the offer board on the hours it runs and the screen stops advertising it at closing time. Weekday and weekend plans can differ.
Kitchen hours, the Sunday roast, the late menu. Each board sits on its own stretch of the timeline and the screen walks through the day.
A board for Thursday that appears on Thursday, scheduled weeks ahead, with the ordinary board resuming after it.
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 does not talk to your till. There is no integration with Square, Toast, Lightspeed, Zettle or any EPOS, so prices on the board are typed rather than synced, and a price changed on the till will not change on the screen. It is also not a sports feed: it will not pull fixtures, live scores or a TV listings schedule, and it is not a way to show a broadcast match. If the screen's job is live sport or till-synced pricing, buy for that. ChannelOS fits the bar whose screens are drinks, offers and what is on this week, and wants them to change on the clock rather than on somebody's memory.
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
Build a drinks board in the browser now, free, and download the PNG.
The whole menu wall on the TVs you already own, priced once and updated everywhere.
Taking a drink off the board without retyping it in the morning.
Dayparting, specials and the kitchen side of the same problem.
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 →