Digital signage content management

Every kind of digital signage content, in one library

Digital signage content management starts with what you can put on a screen. Screenly accepts images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP), video, audio (MP3 and FLAC), and PDFs, where each page becomes its own item you can reorder, rename, or rotate. Video is re-encoded centrally when you upload it, so you never think about codecs, and it is downloaded to the device before it plays, so it never buffers on the wall.

Not everything has to be a file. A web page becomes signage the moment you paste its URL: the device opens it full screen with no tabs or address bar, can sign in to pages behind a login, and can inject JavaScript to hide navigation or scale a layout for a wall. Live camera and encoder feeds come in over RTSP. And the app store carries ready-made, self-updating content for the things screens most often show, including Grafana, Power BI, Salesforce, and Airtable dashboards, Google and Outlook calendars, news feeds, menu boards, clocks, countdowns, and QR codes.

Presentations and spreadsheets are exported first, to images, a PDF, or a video, which takes two or three menu items in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, Excel, or Sheets. The content docs walk through each one.

Playlists and scheduling built for a fleet

A playlist is where content, timing, and screens meet. Each item holds the screen for its own duration, from one second to 24 hours, and videos play for their full length. Playlists can share a screen, taking turns in alphabetical order by title, or a priority playlist can take the screen exclusively while its schedule is active and hand back on its own when it ends, which is how an emergency notice or a lunch menu displaces everything else at the right moment.

A schedule belongs to the playlist, not the screen, so assigning one playlist to fifty screens gives all fifty the same timing with nothing configured per screen. Rules combine dates, time of day, and days of week, with everything inside a rule required and any rule enough, and the schedule editor tells you in plain language when the playlist will actually play. Because every screen evaluates its schedule in its own local time, a rotation written once in London opens at 9am in Singapore and 9am in New York.

Labels: change a hundred screens by changing one thing

Screens and playlists are connected through labels. A playlist labelled warehouse plays on every screen labelled warehouse, now and for any screen given that label next month, and neither side needs to know about the other. Adding a screen to a group, retiring one, or swapping what a whole group shows is one action rather than fifty edits. Labels explains how to design a scheme that still makes sense at two hundred screens.

Content that survives an internet outage

Uploaded files and schedules are cached on the device, so a screen keeps playing the right thing at the right time through an internet outage, and only content that has to fetch something live, such as a web page or a dashboard app, pauses until the connection returns. Changes you make reach a screen on its next check-in, usually within a minute or two on a healthy connection, plus download time, and the screen keeps showing the old content until the new content is fully there.