01 · 02 — Content and scheduling
The part that decides whether anyone keeps using it.
A signage deployment rarely fails because the screens stop working. It fails because publishing became more effort than it was worth, and everybody quietly stopped. Almost everything on this page exists to prevent that.
Content
Templates beat a blank canvas.
Give a busy person an empty layout editor and they will not use it. Give them something already designed with two fields to fill in, and the screens stay current.
A media library, organised the way you are
Images, video and web content, filed by site, department or campaign rather than in one long list. Uploading a file and never finding it again is a surprisingly common way for a system to become unusable.
Layouts with regions
A screen is rarely one thing. A main area, a sidebar, a strip along the bottom — each can carry its own content and its own schedule, so the promotion changes without touching the opening hours beside it.
Templates that hold the brand
Designed once, with the fonts, colours and spacing already correct and only the parts that should change left editable. Head office keeps control of how things look; a branch keeps control of what it says. Both stop needing each other's permission.
Preview before it is on a wall
Seeing the layout as it will actually appear, at the right shape, before anybody walks past it. Obvious, and routinely missing.
Scheduling
Set up once, then it looks after itself.
The most valuable content on most screens is predictable. Everything predictable should be scheduled, not remembered.
Playlists
An ordered sequence with a duration per item, applied to a screen or a group. The everyday unit of publishing.
Time of day
Breakfast until 11:30, lunch until 15:00, the evening set after that. Weekday and weekend variations without a second playlist to maintain.
Date ranges
A promotion that starts on the first and stops on the fourteenth, whether or not anyone is in the office on the fourteenth. Expiry is the single most useful scheduling feature and the one most often skipped.
Priority and interruption
Some content has to appear now and take the screen: a closure notice, a safety message, an event announcement. That is a rule you set in advance, not a scramble on the day.
Per screen or per group
Publish to "all reception screens" once instead of twenty-two times. Add a new screen to the group and it inherits the schedule rather than needing one built.
Default content
What plays when nothing else is scheduled — so a gap in the calendar is a considered fallback rather than a black rectangle.
Who is allowed to do what
Permissions that match how the organisation actually works.
This is the requirement most likely to be underestimated at the start and most likely to cause friction later. The person responsible for one branch's screens is not the person who owns the corporate template, and neither should have to go through the other to do their job.
So access is scoped: to particular screens or groups, to particular content areas, with or without the right to change layouts, with or without an approval step before something goes live. Where an approval step exists it should be because you wanted one, not because the software could not express anything else.
Because the software is ours, a permission structure that does not fit a standard model — a franchise arrangement, a shared building, a department that publishes to screens it does not own — is something we can build rather than something you work around.
If your content lives in a system you already use, we can look at pulling it in rather than asking people to publish twice. What that takes depends entirely on the system, so we scope and price it as part of the project instead of listing it as a feature here.
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Bring us the screen nobody has updated since March.
Tell us what the screens have to say and who should be keeping them current. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, we will say that too.