Internal communications
An all-staff email goes out and the half of the workforce without a desk never sees it, because they do not have an inbox open at eleven on a Tuesday. Internal comms screens exist for exactly that half, and they usually fail because the comms team cannot reach them without raising a ticket.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Typed and on the screens in seconds, because a screen derives what it shows from the schedule in real time. No publish step and nothing to re-upload.
A change made at the end of a shift reaches the staff room before the next one walks in, and the board is still right at three in the morning.
The content nobody has time to build. The assistant drafts a board from a sentence, which is usually the difference between it going up and it not.
Broadcast controls take over every screen on a channel with one message, then put them back on their normal schedule when you end it.
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 is not an employee communications platform. There is no intranet, no app for staff, no read receipts, no targeting by team or role, no acknowledgement tracking and no integration with Workplace, Viva Engage, Slack or Teams. You cannot prove a particular person saw a particular notice, which rules it out where a policy acknowledgement has to be evidenced. If internal comms means measured reach and per-employee targeting, buy a platform built for that. ChannelOS is the screen part: the boards in the staff room, the corridor and the canteen, kept current by the person whose message it is.
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
Lobbies, meeting rooms and the staff-side screens behind them.
The handover board, and why the whiteboard keeps winning.
Taking every screen at once, and the rules about handing them back.
A notice per line with who owns it and when it applies. Free, no account.
Boards you can remix: internal comms 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 →