For salons and barbers
A barbershop raised two prices and the printed card on the wall became wrong in the middle of a Saturday. This is the thing ChannelOS was first used for in anger, and the whole replacement was built on an Android phone between clients.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Services down the left, prices across, with a column per length or per stylist grade. Change a figure on your phone and the wall is right again in seconds.
Who is in today, who takes walk-ins, who is fully booked. A board that answers the question before anyone has to ask the desk.
The retail shelf behind the chair, priced on the screen above it. Easier to change than the labels and easier to read from the chair.
A midweek offer that runs on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons only, placed on those hours and gone again without anybody taking it down.
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 booking system and does not connect to one. It will not show live availability out of Fresha, Treatwell, Booksy or Square Appointments, it cannot take an appointment, and it does not know who is in the chair. If you want the screen to show real-time availability from your booking software, that is a reason to look at a salon-specific display product. ChannelOS is for the board on the wall: prices, services, who is working and what is on offer, changed by you, in under a minute, from your phone.
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
Build the price board in your browser now, free, and download the PNG. No account.
Why most signage setups take days, and what the short version looks like.
What the free screen actually includes, and what it does not.
The whole thing, start to finish, on hardware 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 →