Lobbies and receptions
The reception desk has the wifi password on a card, the fire assembly point on a laminated sheet, today's meetings on a printout and a welcome sign for a visitor who came last month. A lobby screen is mostly a way of getting four pieces of paper off a desk.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
The company name and the visitor's, typed at the desk in seconds. A named welcome is the one piece of signage people photograph.
Wifi, where the lifts are, who to ask, when the building closes. Put once on a screen rather than answered forty times.
What is on and where, laid out on the day's hours so the board moves through the day rather than listing everything at once.
Lift out of service until Friday, placed on those dates, gone on Saturday with nobody taking a sign 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 is not a visitor management system. It does not sign people in, print badges, notify a host, hold a visitor log or integrate with Envoy, Proxyclick, SwipedOn or a room-booking platform, so today's meetings on the board are typed rather than pulled from calendars. If reception needs sign-in, badges and host notifications, buy a visitor management product; several of them will also drive a lobby screen. ChannelOS fits the reception that wants a good-looking welcome board it can change itself, and is happy to type the visitor's name.
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 whole office picture: lobbies, meeting rooms and internal comms.
The screen outside the door, and what it can and cannot know.
Lobby boards, function room signs and guest information.
Lobby, notice and dashboard boards, remixable into your workspace.
Boards you can remix: lobby & welcome screens 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 →