Content is one item in your library. A photograph, a video file, a page of a PDF, a URL, a camera feed, an app. Each one has a name, a type, and settings of its own, and each goes into a playlist to reach a screen.
What you can show
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Images | JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, BMP, and static GIF |
| Videos | MP4, MKV, MOV and the rest, plus YouTube and Vimeo URLs |
| Audio | MP3 and FLAC, played alongside something visual |
| PDFs | Each page becomes its own item |
| Presentations and documents | Exported from Slides, PowerPoint, Keynote, Docs, Word, Pages |
| Spreadsheets | Exported, or connected live from Google Sheets |
| Web pages | Any URL, including pages on your own network |
| Live streams | RTSP from a camera or encoder |
| Local capture | A device plugged into the player |
| Apps | Live, self-updating content from the App store |
The one distinction that matters
Some content is downloaded and stored on the device: images, video, audio, PDF pages. It plays from local storage, which is why a screen keeps working through an internet outage.
Some content is loaded live every time it plays: web pages, streams, and apps on some platforms. It is always current, and it disappears from the rotation while its source is unreachable.
Almost every surprise about Screenly’s behavior comes back to which side of that line a piece of content sits on. See Where content lives.
What is not content
A playlist is not content; it is the rotation content sits in. A schedule is not content; it belongs to the playlist. And a screen holds no content of its own: take its playlists away and it has nothing to show.