Your screen is connected. Here is what to check, and what normal looks like.
Confirm it is working
Open Screens in your dashboard. The screen should show as online, and as in sync once it has downloaded what you assigned it.
Out of sync is not an error. It means the screen is still downloading, and video takes longer than images. It keeps playing whatever it had before until it has everything.
To confirm what is on the display without walking over to it, request a screenshot from the screen’s page. On Anywhere a screenshot shows what our app is drawing rather than the whole device.
What happens when the connection drops
The screen keeps playing. Files you uploaded and the schedule are held on the device, so content keeps playing and scheduled changes still happen on time, within what the platform supports.
What stops is anything that has to fetch something. A web page, or an app pulling live figures, is skipped while it cannot reach its source, and returns once the connection is back.
How much survives an outage varies by platform, because Anywhere is a different build on each one rather than a single piece of software running everywhere. Check the behaviour on the platform you are deploying before you rely on it.
Keep the device awake
The single most common cause of a blank Anywhere screen is the device’s own power settings.
Check the device for a sleep timer, a screensaver, an auto-off schedule, or a power-saving mode, and turn each of them off. A television in particular will often power itself down after a few hours with no remote input.
Expect the host to interrupt occasionally
The device is still running its own operating system, which means it can install its own updates and restart, or show its own messages over your content.
This is the trade you accept with Anywhere, and for most screens it is fine. For a screen where an unexpected restart would be a real problem, ScreenlyOS removes the possibility entirely, because there the device does nothing else.
If something looks wrong
If the screen is online but showing nothing, the playlist is probably not reaching it. Check that the screen you picked, or the label you used, matches what is on the playlist.
If content is stretched or has black bars, its shape does not match the display. Change the screen’s scaling setting, or re-export the content to match.
If the screen never came online, it is almost always the network. Check that the device is actually connected, that it is not on a guest network with a sign-in page, and that outbound traffic is not blocked.
Next
You have a live screen. Building playlists, scheduling them, and organizing screens with labels all work the same way for every Screenly screen, and are covered in the Screenly docs.