For factories and plants
The shift handover board is a whiteboard, and the night shift reads a version of it that somebody wiped at six. Everything the plant has agreed matters is on a board that nobody can see from the other end of the floor.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
What ran, what stopped, what the next shift is walking into. Typed once on a phone at the end of a shift and visible the length of the floor.
Days since, PPE for this area, the current rule after a change. A notice board channel that is actually current, rather than a frame of paper nobody has dated.
Different screens in different areas run different channels from one account, so the paint shop and the dispatch bay are not showing each other's notices.
A web dashboard can be embedded as a layer on a slide, so a board can carry a live page beside the notices rather than being a separate screen nobody set up.
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 read from your MES, SCADA, PLCs or ERP. There is no OEE calculation, no andon logic and no alarm integration, so the live production numbers an operations team wants on a line board are not something ChannelOS computes. It can embed a dashboard page that your own systems already publish, which is often enough, but if the requirement is a signage layer wired into plant telemetry then an industrial visualisation product is the honest purchase. ChannelOS fits the factory whose floor screens are mostly words a person writes: shifts, safety, notices and the things that go out of date because changing them is a chore.
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
Dispatch boards, pick-rate notices and the screens in a goods-in bay.
The handover board as a show, and why the whiteboard keeps winning until it is not.
Embedding a web dashboard as a layer, and what that does and does not get you.
A notice per line with who owns it, including a shift handover preset. No account needed.
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 →