Internal communications

Internal communications on screens, reaching the people without a desk.

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

Running staff-side screens with notices, announcements, shift information, recognition and policy changes, played from the screen's own browser and edited directly by the people who own the message.

How it is different

Five things that are true here and worth checking elsewhere.

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.

  1. 01

    The screen is live, not polling.

    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.

  2. 02

    A channel is a real 24/7 timeline.

    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.

  3. 03

    The editor is built for a phone first.

    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.

  4. 04

    AI is at every step, not one button.

    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.

  5. 05

    Any screen with a browser can play it.

    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

Where ChannelOS is the wrong answer for this.

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

Answered in full, because a half answer costs you a phone call.

What is internal communications digital signage?
It means using screens in staff areas, corridors and canteens to carry notices, shift information, announcements and team news for the part of a workforce that does not sit at a desk or read email during the day. In ChannelOS each board is an editable show played by the browser already in the screen, and the person who owns the message is the person who edits it.
How fast does a notice reach the screens?
Seconds, in normal conditions. A screen holds a live connection and derives what it shows from the schedule in real time rather than downloading a playlist on a timer, so there is no publish step to wait on and no interval to tune. A screen that is offline keeps playing what it has and catches up when it reconnects.
Can we tell who has seen a notice?
No. There are no read receipts, no acknowledgement tracking and no per-person reporting of any kind, so nothing on a ChannelOS screen can evidence that a particular employee saw a particular message. Where a policy change has to be formally acknowledged, that belongs in a system built for it and the screen is a reminder at best.
Can different sites or teams see different boards?
Yes, by channel rather than by audience targeting. A channel is a named feed with its own timeline and a screen tunes into one, so the warehouse staff room, the head-office corridor and the canteen each run their own, and a group-wide notice is one channel they all subscribe to. There is no targeting by role or team, because there are no staff accounts.
Does it integrate with Teams, Slack or an intranet?
No. There is no integration with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Viva Engage, Workplace or any intranet, and no API to post a message from one. A board is authored in ChannelOS. If the requirement is that one post appears in the intranet and on the screens at once, that is a genuine reason to buy an employee communications platform with a signage module.
Who in the business actually edits the boards?
Whoever holds the login, which is deliberately not IT. The editor has a real phone build rather than a shrunken desktop one, and the assistant will draft or reword a board by chat, so a shift lead or an office manager can put something up from a phone without being trained on a design tool first.

More of these on Answers, which covers cost, hardware and what happens when the wifi drops.

When a box is the right answer

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 rest of the picture.

Boards you can remix: internal comms templates , each one opening in your own workspace in a single click.

Get one screen live first.

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 →