For campuses
A department has a screen in its own corridor and a slide deck it cannot get onto it without raising a ticket, so the screen shows last term's open day. Campus signage rarely fails on hardware. It fails because the people with something to say are three approvals away from the screen.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Seminars, deadlines, who is in which office this week. The department keeps its own channel, so a change is an edit, not a request to somebody else.
The notice that has to go up this morning and come down at noon. Place it on the hours it applies to and it takes itself down.
A different board in the foyer for one Saturday, scheduled weeks ahead, with the ordinary board resuming on its own afterwards.
Opening hours, quiet-period rules, what is closed for an exam. Several screens on one channel so a change lands across the site at once.
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 student information system, a timetabling product like Celcat or Syllabus Plus, or a room-booking platform. It will not generate a room-change board from your timetable feed and it has no single sign-on with your identity provider, so access is ChannelOS accounts rather than campus accounts. A university that needs the timetable to drive the screens should buy an education signage platform with that integration. ChannelOS fits the campus where the real problem is that departments cannot reach their own screens, and the content is words a person writes.
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 K-12 version: hallway boards without an IT project.
Why a campus with forty screens is not forty times the work.
Staff-side screens, and the difference between a notice and an announcement.
Twenty-four lessons, one job each, for handing a screen to somebody who has never run one.
Boards you can remix: higher education 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 →