ScreenRoll turns any television into a screen you control from here. You put in
pictures and videos, say when and where they should play, and the screens do the
rest — including when the internet goes down.
The whole product is four ideas stacked on each other. Everything else in this help centre is detail on top of them, so it is worth spending a minute here.
The four ideas
1MediaA picture, a video, a web animation, an advert. Everything you might ever show lives in one library.
2PlaylistThe order things play in. Like a music playlist, but for a screen.
3ScheduleWhen and where a playlist plays. Mornings, weekends, one café or all forty.
4ScreenThe television itself. It follows the schedule and reports back what it played.
Read it as one sentence: media goes into playlists, playlists go into schedules, schedules play on screens. If you can hold that, you can find your way around everything else.
Why it existsEvery digital signage product has some version of these four. What differs is what happens when reality intrudes — the shop's wifi drops, a panel is unplugged, two playlists claim the same screen at the same hour. ScreenRoll is built so that the answer to all of those is “the screen keeps playing”, and so that you can see afterwards exactly what it played.
A screen keeps working offline. It holds its schedule for seven days and keeps the actual files on its own disk, so a café with an unreliable line plays all day and catches up on reporting later. Nothing about that is automatic elsewhere, and it is the single biggest reason a screen looks broken when it is not. Inside the player explains what it keeps and for how long.
Your screens can earn money. You can hand part of your loop to advertisers, who bid for each individual play, and a policy you set decides which advertisers may appear — by category, or one by one. That is optional — plenty of networks never switch it on — but it is why several of the pages in the sidebar exist. How advertising works covers it.
Example — A three-café network
You own three cafés. You upload a menu image and two short videos (media). You put them in a loop called “Daytime” (playlist). You say it plays 07:00–15:00 on all three (schedule). Three televisions, paired once, play it (screens). At 15:00 a second schedule takes over with the evening menu. You never touch the televisions again.
Where to go next
If you have a television in front of you, Your first screen gets it playing in ten minutes. If you are still deciding whether this fits, A tour of the interface shows what the product actually contains. And if you arrived with one specific question, Common questions is the short way in.