Promoting live sport and fixtures on pub screens

The way to promote live sport on pub screens is a fixtures board that's always current, shown where people decide whether to stay for the game, plus a match-day takeover that puts the game details on every screen while it's on. Keep the fixtures as a list you update in a minute, and let the schedule change the screens over at kick-off and back again afterwards. Nobody behind the bar should have to think about it on a Saturday.

The match itself comes from your sports box

The game comes in through your commercial sports subscription, on the TV's own HDMI input from the broadcaster's box. Casty runs your own content around it, such as the fixtures board and the menus. Some pubs share one TV between the two and switch inputs with the remote, though it's usually easier to keep the sport on the sport screens and give your own content separate screens nearby.

A fixtures board that keeps itself tidy

Fixtures change every week, so they're easiest to keep as data. In Casty that's a dataset, a simple table you fill in like a spreadsheet, shown on a layout with the DataSet widget. Design the board once, and from then on adding a game is a one-row job. The screens pick up the change without anyone republishing anything.

In the Casty demo, The Crown's fixtures dataset has five columns: Date, Time, Competition, Fixture and Screens. The Screens column is the handy one. "Which telly's the rugby on?" is a question your staff hear all afternoon, and a column on the board answers it before anyone asks.

A few habits keep the board useful:

• Delete games once they've been played, so the next ones fit on the screen.
• Check the list on a Monday. Broadcasters move kick-off times, and a board with the wrong time on it causes more grief than a board with no time at all.
• Only list games you're definitely showing.
• If you already plan fixtures in a spreadsheet, save it as a CSV file and import it, either adding to what's there or replacing the lot.

The widget's settings let you sort by a column, filter rows and limit how many show, so you can keep a whole month in the dataset and show the next eight games. The pub fixtures tutorial builds The Crown's board from start to finish, and showing a table of data covers datasets in general.

A dataset can also fetch its rows from a web address, such as a sports data service you subscribe to. That needs details from whoever runs the service, so talk to us before you set it up.

Where the board earns its keep

Behind the bar during the day is the obvious place. The Crown's bar screen shows the board from 11:00 to 17:00 every day, scheduled once with a daily repeat. People waiting for a pint read it while they wait.

A screen in the window or by the door does a different job. A slide that says "Live here today" with the game and the kick-off time catches people walking past who were planning to watch it somewhere else. Keep that version short; the full list belongs inside. Where to put screens in a venue has more on placing them.

Match day: take over every screen

On the day of a big game, you probably want every screen in the pub on the match details, including the ones that usually show food menus. Casty does this with a priority event. Everyday events sit at priority 0. An event with priority 1 plays in place of everything at priority 0 for as long as it runs, then the screens go back to their usual content without anyone touching them.

In the demo, The Crown schedules its fixtures board on all three screens (bar, garden room and kitchen pass) from 14:30 to 17:30 for a Saturday derby, with priority 1. At 17:30 the garden room goes back to its evening rotation and the kitchen pass goes back to the menu.

Start the event a little before kick-off and end it after the final whistle, with room for injury time and the post-match chat. Use the lowest priority number that does the job, because a priority event covers everything below it on those screens, other promotions included. For the next big game, make a copy of the event and change the name and times.

Priority, interrupts and overlays explains the full set of options.

Smaller touches that help

You don't always want a full takeover. A few lighter options:

• An overlay layout puts a strip along the bottom of whatever's already playing, such as "England v Wales, kick-off 8pm, garden room". The menu carries on above it.
• A Countdown widget counts down to a date and time, which suits the build-up to a big final.
• An interrupt layout gives a match-day food deal a set number of seconds every hour, on top of the normal rotation.
• The Webpage widget can show a live score page, as long as the screen has a working internet connection at the time.

What to write

Keep fixtures scannable. Day, time and the two teams, written the way your customers say them, plus the screen if you have more than one. If you're showing a game with sound in one room only, say so on the board. Big fixtures can have their own slide in the week before, with a photo and a line about booking tables if you take bookings.

If you pair a match with a drinks offer, there are licensing rules on promotions to keep in mind. The post on happy hours and time-limited offers covers them.