For QSR chains
A promo was supposed to go live on Monday and by Thursday somebody notices it went up in eleven stores out of nineteen. The problem is never the first store. It is knowing, without phoning anyone, what the other eighteen are actually showing.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Stores tune into a channel, so the board is edited once and every store on that channel follows it. A second store costs no extra work.
Breakfast, lunch and late boards each placed on their own hours, every store following its own clock, with nobody in a store for the switch.
A campaign placed on its dates goes up everywhere on the day and comes down on its own, which is the half printed promos always get wrong.
The screens board answers that without a phone call, which is usually the actual job when somebody asks whether the promo landed.
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 POS or a menu management system. There is no sync with Toast, Square, Oracle Micros, NCR or a franchise menu database, so prices and item availability are maintained in ChannelOS rather than fed from the till, and an item 86'd on the POS will not disappear from the board by itself. There is also no approval workflow, no franchisee permission hierarchy and no brand-compliance locking, so a chain that needs head office to approve what a franchisee may change should expect to buy enterprise QSR signage for that. ChannelOS fits the growing chain, from a handful of stores up, whose boards are maintained by a small central team.
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 single-site version: menu boards, dayparting and specials.
Why the tenth store costs the same work as the second.
Outdoor brightness, order-point layout and the timing of a lane.
The whole menu wall on the screens you already own.
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 →