Somewhere in your building there’s probably a sheet of paper taped to a wall that’s wrong. The hours changed last week, or a class moved rooms, and nobody reprinted it. A TV on that wall can fix it, but only if the pieces behind it fit together and somebody looks after each one.
Anything that helps you make, send, schedule or show content on a screen counts. Some pages treat “tools” as software only. Others mean hardware, and others mean a bundle of both. Gartner’s digital signage reviews list as a mandatory feature that the software “creates and controls multimedia content for electronic displays”, which leaves the player and the schedule for you to sort out.
The market is crowded either way. The independent directory SignageList says you can browse and compare 635 products across pricing, platform support and licensing, and that’s just the software side.
That number is the reason to think in parts instead of products. Once you know the 4 jobs that need doing, you can look at any product and ask which ones it covers and which ones it leaves to you.
The 4 parts are the design tool, the content source, the player and the schedule. Most setups that fail are missing one of them, or have two people who each assume the other one owns it.
| Part | What it does | Typical owner on a small team | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design tool | Where you build the slides people see | Whoever writes your signs or posts to social media today | Can a non-designer finish a slide in one sitting? |
| Content source | Pulls in things that change by themselves, like weather, a calendar or a feed | The person who already keeps that information current | Does it update without anyone touching a thing? |
| Player | The small box that holds your content and sends it to the TV | One named person, with IT as backup | What happens when the internet drops or the power cuts out? |
| Schedule | Decides what plays, on which screen, and when it retires | Whoever approves announcements | Can old messages remove themselves on a date? |
2 of these jobs are about content. The other 2 keep it running when nobody’s watching, and that’s where small teams usually get caught.
You need somewhere to build slides, but it doesn’t have to be a separate program. Many signage platforms include a drag-and-drop page builder, and you can often bring in designs you already made elsewhere.
The test is whether the person who writes your signs today can use it. Ask for one slide to be built while you watch, using your real hours or your real price list. If the demo needs a designer, so will every future change.
Give this job to whoever already does your printed signs or your social posts. They know your wording and your logo, and they’ll notice when a slide looks off.
Keep each slide to one message. Then walk to where people stand and look at it on your own TV, because a slide that looks right on a laptop often reads differently across a room. Judge text size by eye on that TV, from where your audience stands.
Weather, a shared calendar, a news or RSS feed, a social media account and a live web page are the usual content sources, and each one feeds your TVs without anyone typing it in.
This is where a small team saves the most time. A slide you build by hand is right on the day you make it and stale a week later. A slide wired to a calendar stays right on its own.
The catch is that a feed is only as good as the person who looks after the thing behind it. If the events calendar is out of date, your lobby shows out-of-date events.
So hand the feed to whoever already owns the information. If your front desk keeps the class calendar, the front desk should be the only place that calendar gets edited. Then nobody has to remember to update 2 things.
Your design tool makes the slides, and the player gets them onto the wall. It’s the small box that stores your content and plays it on the TV.
People skip this part, and it decides whether the setup survives a normal week. A TV by itself can only show what you plug into it. Something has to hold the content, restart after a power cut and keep playing when the Wi-Fi is down.
When you compare players, ask these questions:
We go through those questions in more detail in Digital signage players: what to buy for small teams. There’s also a shorter piece on why hardware meant for digital signage behaves differently from the streaming stick you may already have plugged in.
Pick one named person to own the player. When a TV goes dark, you don’t want 3 people each assuming someone else walked over to check.
Think of the schedule as the TV guide for your lobby. It decides what plays, on which screen, at what time of day, and on what date it should disappear. Without one, a screen slowly turns into a wall of old announcements.
A small team gets the most from 2 features. The first is an end date on every time-limited message, so the holiday notice removes itself. The second is different content at different times, like breakfast information in the morning and a class schedule in the afternoon.
Give the schedule to whoever approves announcements. Set the end date when you create a time-limited message, not later. Preview each update before publishing, then check it on the actual TV.
One person should be responsible for the screens as a whole, and the 4 parts can be shared out beneath that person. If nobody holds the whole thing, the content goes stale and everyone assumes it’s somebody else’s job.
Beth Gillespie of Saco Sport & Fitness describes what that looks like day to day: “Easy, easy to change the messages. I can do it from home.” Her club replaced its paper signs, and you can read how in Saco Fitness boosts member engagement with digital displays.
The most common mistake is buying software and assuming the rest will sort itself out. It rarely does, because the player, the schedule and the owner are all still unanswered.
Teams also pick a tool by its feature list instead of by who’ll run it. A setup that a designer loves and a front desk avoids will be out of date within a month.
Old content is another trap. A TV that shows last month’s offer tells people nobody’s paying attention, which is worse than a blank wall. Set end dates when you create a message and the problem mostly goes away.
Then there’s the offline question, which people forget to ask before they buy. Content that has already downloaded should keep playing with no internet, while live content such as streaming video or a web page needs a connection. Knowing the difference keeps you from building your whole loop on something that fails during an outage.
Finally, plenty of teams lean on a free or do-it-yourself setup without naming who supports it. That can be a fine choice for one screen and a patient person. That ‘cheap’ stick gets expensive fast when it freezes on a Monday morning and signage is already sixth on your to-do list.
Write 4 names on a sheet of paper today: who builds the slides, who owns each feed, who looks after the player, and who approves what plays. If any line is blank, that’s the gap to fix before you compare a single product. If you run a clinic, waiting room digital signage without the privacy risk covers the extra care that setting needs. For other kinds of business, our industries page shows how teams like yours use screens.
Digital signage technology is the set of tools that put changing content on a screen: software to design and schedule it, a player to store and send it, and a display to show it. Together they replace printed signs with messages you can update from a desk or a phone.
Any HDMI TV can work as a signage display, so you don’t need a special screen to start. Buy a TV from an ordinary electronics retailer, then add a player. Commercial displays make sense when a screen runs long hours or sits in a harsh enviorment.
Content the player has already downloaded should keep playing. Live content, such as streaming video or a web page, needs a connection. Ask any vendor how its player behaves offline and whether it restarts on its own after a power cut.
Name one owner for the screens as a whole. Then share the parts: whoever writes your printed signs builds slides, whoever keeps a calendar owns that feed, and a backup covers absences. IT can vet the setup once and hand it off.
SmartSign2Go sells a player that ships already set up, plus a per-screen software subscription with a drag-and-drop page builder and scheduling. Plans start at $19 per screen per month. You can see the players and plans on the shop page.
If you want the design tool, the schedule and the player from one company, SmartSign2Go sells them together. Plans start at $19 per screen per month, and the players ship already set up, so you plug one into a TV and get going. You can look at the shop and the pricing page to see which plan fits. If you’d like to talk it through, you can book a demo, or call us at (844) 888-7446, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm Pacific, and a person will pick up.
