Social walls
Somebody asks for the hashtag wall at an event and the honest version of the answer involves what each platform will and will not let you embed any more. Social walls got harder, and most products selling one are quietly selling a scraper.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
An individual post or profile embed sits on a slide as an element, beside your own heading and the rest of the board, rather than owning the screen.
The wall holds for the duration you set and the board moves on. At an event that matters, because the schedule still has to carry the sessions.
The wall on the show floor during opening hours, something else overnight, because the board sits on a channel timeline.
When a site forbids framing, the board names which site refused instead of showing the browser's grey error page, which is what makes a wall look broken on a TV.
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
This is the use case where ChannelOS is most often the wrong answer, so read it before you choose. There is no hashtag aggregation, no feed of posts matching a tag, no moderation queue, no profanity filter and no approval step, and ChannelOS does not hold API credentials for any platform on your behalf. What it does is embed what the platforms themselves allow to be embedded, and several of them have narrowed that considerably. If you need a curated, moderated hashtag wall for a public event, buy a social wall product: that is a real category and it exists because this is genuinely hard. Use ChannelOS when the social element is one layer of a board you are building anyway.
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
Schedules, room signs and sponsor loops, rewritten from a phone mid-event.
The other embedding case, with the same framing limits and the same honesty.
Taking every screen at once for the thing everyone needs to see.
What it costs, what runs it, what happens when the wifi drops.
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 →