Dashboards
Somebody wants the sales dashboard on the wall, so a laptop gets taped behind a TV with a browser tab open, and six weeks later it is showing a login screen. A dashboard on a TV is easy to do once and hard to keep doing.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
A web page is placed on a slide as an element, so it sits beside the heading and the notices rather than taking the whole screen. The board is still a board.
The dashboard holds for as long as you set, then the board moves on to the notices and comes back. A screen does not have to be one thing for ever.
The dashboard on the working day, something else in the evening, because the board is placed on a channel timeline rather than left running.
The screen's own browser plays the board, so there is no second machine to log back in, update or find a power socket for.
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 data sources and builds nothing. There is no connector for Google Sheets, BigQuery, Snowflake, Salesforce, HubSpot or a database, no chart builder, no metric definitions and no alerting. The dashboard has to already exist as a web page at a URL that your tool publishes, and anything behind a login that needs an interactive sign-in will show that login on the screen. Many dashboards also refuse to be embedded at all, because their own servers send a header that forbids it, and nothing on our side can overrule that. If you want signage that queries your data and draws the chart, buy a dashboard product with a TV mode.
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
Line boards with a dashboard layer beside the shift and safety notices.
Lobby, meeting room and internal comms screens.
Reaching the staff without a desk, and what screens cannot prove.
What it costs, what runs it, what happens when the wifi drops, in plain words.
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 →