Wayfinding
A department moves floor and every printed arrow in the building becomes a lie at once. Wayfinding is the signage that goes wrong least often and costs the most to put right, because it is the signage most likely to be printed, framed and screwed to a wall.
No card · no box to buy · pairs in about two minutes
What goes on the screen
Arrows, floor numbers and department names set at a size that reads at distance. Every element is selectable, so a moved department is an edit rather than a reprint.
A corridor screen is usually on its end. A show is authored in the aspect you choose, so a 9:16 board is designed as a column rather than a landscape board turned sideways.
Who is on which floor, which room, which entrance. One board on a channel, so every screen showing the directory changes together.
A corridor closed for works gets a date-scoped board that appears on those days and removes itself afterwards, with the normal directions resuming on their own.
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 interactive wayfinding system. It does not render a pannable map, it has no touch interaction model, no route-finding, no search-for-a-room and no accessible-route logic, and it does not integrate with a floor plan or CAD source. If what you need is a touchscreen kiosk where a visitor taps a destination and gets a route, buy an interactive wayfinding product. ChannelOS fits the static directional board and the floor directory: the things that are a sign, that have to be right, and that are currently printed because changing them is somebody's afternoon.
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
Hanging a screen sideways, and designing for the shape rather than rotating a board.
What size and what type height reads from a given distance.
Corridor directions, department boards and the rules about patient information.
Department corridors each running their own channel.
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 →