Connection and content are tracked separately, because they fail separately.
How often a screen checks in
A ScreenlyOS screen pings us roughly every 30 seconds, with a random delay of up to six minutes added on top. The spread is deliberate: it stops a whole fleet calling home in lockstep.
It also sends a full health report every 15 minutes. A report older than 45 minutes is flagged as stale on the screen’s Details tab.
A Screenly Anywhere screen pings every 30 seconds, checks its playlist every 5 minutes, and sends its configuration and report every 15 minutes.
Why a command is sometimes not instant
When a screen is online it usually holds an open connection to us, and commands like a reboot or a settings change arrive immediately.
When that connection is closed, commands wait for the next ping instead. Nothing is lost, it just takes up to a few minutes. The Details tab says so explicitly when this is happening, rather than leaving you to wonder.
This is why the advice on settings is to allow around fifteen minutes before deciding a change did not work.
Online and in sync are different
Online means we heard from it. In sync means it has everything it is supposed to be showing. They fail separately, so a screen can be in any of four states.
| Online | In sync | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Healthy and current |
| Yes | No | Downloading, and still showing the previous content meanwhile |
| No | Yes | Offline, but playing exactly the right thing |
| No | No | Offline, and will catch up when it reconnects |
The third row is the one people find surprising, and it is the point of the design.
A screen that is online but not in sync is downloading. It keeps playing what it already had throughout, so the audience sees no interruption, and video takes considerably longer than images.
A screen that is offline and out of sync will catch up on its own when it reconnects. There is nothing to press.
When a screen goes offline
Content already on the device keeps playing. Files you uploaded are stored locally and schedules are held on the device, so a screen carries on showing the right thing at the right time through an outage.
What stops is anything that needs the network: web pages and apps pulling live data are skipped while they cannot reach their source, and rejoin the rotation when the connection returns.
That property is the reason an offline screen is often not urgent. It is also the reason nobody notices for a week, which is what alerts are for.