For dealerships
The finance offer on the showroom screen expired at the end of last month and the file that made it is on a laptop somebody took home. Dealership screens are usually fine hardware running content nobody on site can edit.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
This month's finance offer, the models it applies to and the small print, changed on site the day the offer changes.
What is included in a service, the MOT reminder, the courtesy car rules. The questions a service desk answers all day.
Something to read for forty minutes that is not a news channel. Opening hours, what else you do, the coffee machine.
A group offer is one channel every site subscribes to, so the manufacturer's campaign goes up the same day everywhere.
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 has no DMS or inventory integration. It will not pull stock from your dealer management system, it does not generate a vehicle board per car on the forecourt, and prices and specs on the screen are typed rather than fed. If the requirement is a live inventory wall that reflects what is actually in stock, buy automotive signage built for that feed. ChannelOS fits the dealership whose screens are campaigns, service information and waiting-area boards, and whose real problem is that nobody on site can change 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
Promo screens on displays you already have, and campaigns that end themselves.
A campaign with a start and an end date, and the board that resumes after it.
What earns its place on a screen somebody stares at for forty minutes.
How a second site costs no extra work.
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 →