# Where content lives


> Uploaded files are downloaded to the device and played from local storage. Web pages and streams are not. That difference decides what happens offline.
Nothing streams from us during playback. A screen downloads what it needs and plays from its own storage.

## Getting there

Screens check in, notice there is something new, and download it in the background.

A screen does not wait for a whole playlist before showing anything. If a new playlist has five items and only the first has finished downloading, the screen starts showing that one and loops it, adding the others as they arrive. Each file is downloaded once and kept.

This is why a change takes a few minutes rather than being instant, and why video takes longer than images.

## When the connection drops

A screen with everything already downloaded keeps playing, and its schedule is held locally too, so content still changes on time through an outage.

What it cannot do is show something it never received. Content added while a screen was offline plays once the screen reconnects and fetches it.

Web pages, streams, and server-rendered apps are the exception: they need their source, so they are skipped while it is unreachable and rejoin the rotation when it comes back.

## When storage fills up

The device manages its own storage. Once free space falls below **1 GB**, it starts deleting cached files that are not in the current playlist to make room for new downloads.

Two consequences.

Deleting content in the dashboard removes it from playlists immediately but does not wipe it from devices that already have it. That copy stays cached until the space is needed or the device is reflashed.

And because the device decides what to evict, a player asked to hold more content than it has room for will re-download things it has already had. A screen that seems to be permanently downloading is usually overloaded rather than broken. A shorter playlist or larger storage both fix it.

## Content goes through your workspace

There is no FTP, no USB pickup, and no way to hand a file to a player directly. Everything reaches a device through your workspace, which is what makes a fleet manageable rather than a set of individual machines.

Content that never passed through Screenly was never validated or re-encoded, which is the other half of the reason.

A page on your own network is the exception, because the screen fetches it rather than us. See [Local and intranet pages](/docs/content/web-pages/displaying-a-web-page/).