Digital signage content management

Screenly takes images (JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP), video, audio (MP3 and FLAC) and PDFs, where each page becomes its own item. Video is re-encoded when you upload it, so codecs are never your problem, 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 plays full screen from its URL, including pages behind a login, and JavaScript injection can strip the menus made for a laptop. Camera and encoder feeds come in over RTSP. Presentations and spreadsheets play once they are exported as images, a PDF or a video.

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 to the end. Playlists can share a screen and take turns, or a priority playlist can take a screen while its schedule is active and hand it back when the schedule ends, which is how an emergency notice or a lunch menu replaces everything else at the right moment.

The schedule belongs to the playlist, not the screen, so fifty screens on one playlist share its timing with nothing set per screen. Every screen reads the schedule in its own local time: a rotation written once in London opens at 9am in Singapore and at 9am in New York, and the dashboard says in plain words when a playlist will play.

Screens and playlists meet through labels. A playlist labelled warehouse plays on every screen labelled warehouse, including the 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 change rather than fifty.

Files and schedules are stored on the device as well as in the cloud, so a screen keeps playing the right thing at the right time without a connection. Only content that fetches something live, such as a web page or a dashboard app, pauses until the connection returns. A change reaches a screen within a minute or two on a healthy connection, and the screen keeps showing the old content until the new content is fully there.