Promotions
The offer ended on the thirty-first and the poster is still in the window on the fourth, because taking a promotion down is a job nobody is assigned and nobody misses until a customer asks for the price on the sign. Expired promotions are the most common thing wrong with retail signage.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
The offer board occupies the days the offer runs and the ordinary board resumes on its own afterwards. Expiry is scheduling, not a reminder.
Screens tune into a channel, so a campaign goes live across every site at once rather than being loaded screen by screen.
The screens board shows what each screen is playing right now, which is the real question when somebody asks whether the promo landed.
A quiet-hour offer on the afternoon hours and the full-price board the rest of the time, both on one channel following its own clock.
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 pricing or promotions engine. It does not read a price file, does not integrate with a POS or an ERP, and does not know what an item costs, so a figure on a promo board is typed and a price changed in your systems will not change on the screen. There is no approval workflow either, so if customer-facing offer copy needs sign-off, that happens outside ChannelOS. There is no audience measurement, no proof-of-play reporting for an advertiser and no footfall attribution, so if you are selling promotional slots to third parties and have to report plays, buy a product with proof-of-play. ChannelOS fits your own promotions on your own screens.
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
Promo screens on displays you already have, and the campaign that ends itself.
Monthly finance offers that come down on their own.
Why the tenth site is the same work as the second.
What a paid screen costs, and exactly what the free screen includes.
Boards you can remix: promotions & offers 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 →