For cafés
Somebody asks ChatGPT how to get a coffee menu onto the TV above the counter, builds a board in one sitting, and then never walks over to the television. That is the most common way a café meets this product, and the gap between a good-looking board and a board actually on the wall is the part worth fixing.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Hand over the PDF you already print from, or describe the menu in a sentence, and the AI drafts the whole multi-slide board. What comes back is editable, not a flat export.
The thing that changes every morning, changed in under a minute from a phone while the grinder warms up.
Mark a line sold out and it stays on the board, struck through, with the price intact for the morning.
Three boards on one channel, each on its own hours, so the screen swaps service period without anybody touching 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 integrate with a till or an ordering platform. There is no sync with Square, Toast, Lightspeed, Zettle, Deliveroo or Uber Eats, so prices are typed and a change made on the till will not reach the screen. It is not a self-order kiosk and takes no payments. If the board has to be generated from the POS menu, buy a hospitality signage product with that integration. ChannelOS is faster when the job is getting a good-looking, current board onto the screen above the counter and keeping it that way from a phone.
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
Type a menu, watch it render, download the PNG. No account, no email, no watermark.
What the assistant does with a PDF menu, and what it gets wrong.
The whole menu wall, priced once and updated everywhere.
Start to finish, including the walk to the television.
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 →