A screen in Screenly stands for one display you are looking after. That display might be in a lobby, on a warehouse floor, or in a meeting room. Screenly gives each one a place in your workspace, so you can manage it from wherever you are.
A screen really has two sides: the surface your audience sees, and the device behind it that does the playing. Most of the time you work with the surface. When something needs attention, you look at the device.
The surface
Day to day, a screen is a simple thing to hold in your head. It carries:
- A name, so you can tell it apart from the rest.
- The content assigned to it, which decides what it shows.
- A status, which tells you whether it is online and up to date.
You name it, point content at it, and check that it is doing its job. For most screens on most days, that is the whole of it.
The device behind it
The device is not a black box, though. Screenly reports on its condition, so you are never guessing whether a screen on the far side of the country is healthy.
How much you can see depends on what runs the screen. On Screenly Anywhere, the view reaches only as far as the host system allows. On ScreenlyOS, where the whole device is ours, it goes deep: the device’s health and network address, how much storage it has left, even a live snapshot of what is on the screen this moment. You can check any screen, wherever it sits, as if you were standing in front of it.
So a screen is two things at once. It is a single object you name and point content at, and a real device you can see into whenever you need to.