For events and venues
A session overruns, the next one moves rooms, and you are asked to fix the signs while standing in the hall holding a phone and a lanyard. Event signage is the one case where the change is always needed by somebody who is not at a desk.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
What is on, where, and when the next one starts. Placed on the hours it belongs to, so the board moves through the day on its own.
The screen outside the room, rewritten in under a minute when a session moves. Portrait screens are a first-class shape here, not a rotated 16:9 board.
A rotation that has to be right because somebody paid for it, with each sponsor's slide holding for as long as you set it.
Broadcast controls take every screen over for the thing everyone needs to see, then put them back on schedule afterwards.
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 connect to event platforms. There is no integration with Eventbrite, Cvent, Swapcard, Hopin or a conference app, so a session board is not generated from your agenda feed and will not reflect a last-minute change made in that system. It does not do registration, badge printing, ticket scanning or attendee data. For a large conference whose signage must stay in step with the agenda tool, buy event signage built for that integration. ChannelOS fits the venue or organiser whose screens are a handful rather than a hundred, and who would rather rewrite a sign in thirty seconds than file a change request.
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
Arrows, floors and room names, drawn to read from the far end of a corridor.
Interrupting every screen at once, and the rules about giving them back.
Hanging a screen sideways for a door sign, and designing for the shape.
Conference, festival and schedule boards, remixable into your own workspace.
Boards you can remix: events & venues templates , each one opening in your own workspace in a single click.
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 →