A screen is one display and the device driving it, managed as a single thing. It has a name, a location, settings, labels, and a health report of its own.
It also holds one license for as long as it is enabled.
One device, one screen
The count is devices, not panels. A player driving a four-panel video wall as one continuous picture is one screen and one license, because there is one device and one thing being shown.
Two players in the same room are two screens even if they show the same playlist.
Two kinds
Every screen is managed from the same dashboard, appears in the same list, and takes the same playlists. What differs is how much of the device Screenly controls.
| ScreenlyOS | Screenly Anywhere | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on | Our own operating system, on the whole device | An app on the device’s existing operating system |
| Display settings | Rotation, resolution, overscan, audio and video output | Rotation and object fit |
| Remote reboot | Yes | No |
| Screenshots | Yes | No |
| Private network access | Yes, over Tailscale | No |
| Health reporting | Power, temperature, storage, network checks | Basic |
Neither is a lesser screen. Anywhere trades depth of control for running on hardware you already own, which is usually the right trade until it is not. See Screenly Anywhere for what each platform supports.
What a screen is not
It is not where content lives. A screen has no content of its own: everything it shows arrives through a playlist, and a screen with no playlist assigned has nothing to show.
It is not a per-person thing either. Everyone in the workspace sees every screen in it. See Roles and permissions.
It is not divisible. One screen shows one thing at a time, and there is no way to split it into zones. Part of the reason is technical, and the bigger part is that multi-zone layouts do not work well: people look at a screen for a few seconds, and a layout divided into a video, a ticker, and a sidebar spends those seconds competing with itself. If you need several things on one display, build them into one piece of content, a single web page or app laid out the way you want, which the screen then shows as one item.
And it is not interactive. Screens play; they do not respond to being touched, and touch input is not supported. A QR code moves the interaction to the phone in the viewer’s pocket, which is usually better anyway.