What is digital signage? A plain guide for venue owners
· 6 min read
Digital signage is a screen in your venue showing content you control from a website: your menu, this week's offers, Saturday's fixtures, tomorrow's spin classes. You make a change on a laptop or phone, the screen picks it up, and nobody has to climb a stepladder with a USB stick. Behind each screen sits a small player that stores the content and plays it at the times you've set.
The rest of this guide explains the moving parts in plain terms, so you can work out whether it's worth doing in your place and what you'd need.
What it looks like in a real venue
Most venue signage is pretty ordinary, and that's fine. A cafe has a screen above the counter with the menu on it, and at half eleven the breakfast items swap for lunch without anyone going near it. A pub has a TV by the bar that cycles through the quiz night poster, the Sunday roast and the fixtures list, then gets taken over for the match. Gyms put today's classes on the screen at reception. A shop rotates offers in the window so people walking past see something different each time.
In the Casty demo account, Harbour Cafe in Falmouth is set up like that first example. It has a screen behind the counter and one in the window, and two dayparts (breakfast and lunch) switch both of them from one menu to the other at 11:30 every day.
The screen, the player and the CMS
Whoever you buy signage from, the setup has the same parts.
The screen is the bit people see. It can be a normal TV you already own or a commercial display made to run all day. There's more on that choice in consumer TV or commercial display.
The player is a small app that runs your content. It can live on a stick or box plugged into the TV's HDMI port, on a PC, or inside the screen itself (Samsung, LG, Sony, Philips and Hisense all make commercial displays with the player built in). It checks in with the CMS regularly, downloads whatever's scheduled for that screen and plays it from its own storage. Because it keeps a copy, the screen carries on if the internet drops.
The CMS (content management system, though nobody calls it that out loud) is the website where you do the work. With Casty that's app.casty.co.uk. You upload pictures and videos, design what each screen shows, decide when it shows, and keep an eye on whether the screens are behaving. There's nothing to install on your computer and no server humming away in the back office.
How a picture gets from your laptop to the wall
Say you've got a poster for Friday's live music saved as a JPG. In Casty it goes like this:
- Upload it to the media library.
- Put it in a layout, which is one screen design. A layout can be a single full-screen picture, or a split screen with the menu on one side and a video on the other.
- Publish the layout. Screens only ever play published layouts, so a half-finished design can't sneak out.
- Add it to the schedule: which screens, which days, which hours.
- Let the screen check in. It downloads the poster and starts showing it at the time you set. If you can't wait, Collect Now tells an online screen to check in straight away.
The quick start guide walks through those steps with screenshots, and how Casty works explains the words you'll meet on the way.
What a screen can do that paper can't
Paper's cheap and it never needs Wi-Fi. A printed poster shows one thing all day, though, and changing it means printing, laminating and Blu-tacking a new one.
A screen can show different things at different times. The breakfast menu can run until half eleven and the lunch menu after that, with a happy hour slide slotted in from five till seven. In Casty those slots are dayparts: you name each one once and reuse it whenever you schedule something. Offers can have an expiry date so they drop off on their own, which saves you from the Christmas promotion that's still up in the middle of January.
It can show information that changes, too. Casty's menu boards keep your products and prices separate from the design, so you change a price once and every screen showing that item updates. Datasets do the same job for anything that looks like a table, such as fixtures, class times or room bookings.
And you can see what's on a screen without being there. The Displays list in the CMS shows when each screen last checked in and what it's playing, and you can ask any online screen for a screenshot. That's handy when you run two sites, or when you're at home on your day off and someone messages to say the telly looks odd.
What it won't do for you
Someone still has to make the content and keep it current. A screen showing last month's quiz night looks worse than a blank wall, and regulars do notice. Make one person responsible for the screens and give them a regular slot each week to check them.
It also needs an internet connection to pick up changes. Players store their content and keep playing through a dropout, but anything live (a web page, a live stream) stops until the connection comes back, and edits you make in the meantime wait at the CMS. What happens when the internet drops goes into that properly.
What you need to get started
A screen, a player for it and an internet connection. If you've got a TV with an HDMI port you can probably use it, because an Amazon Signage Stick or an Android media player plugs straight in. If you're buying new, a commercial display with the player built in saves you the box.
The devices page lists every player Casty supports, and choosing a media player goes through the options in more depth. For costs, the pricing page covers the Casty side and budgeting for digital signage covers everything else, from brackets to the hours it takes to make content.
Questions people ask
Do I need a smart TV for digital signage?
No. The player does the work, so the TV only needs an HDMI input to plug it into, and its own smart apps don't come into it. Some commercial displays run the player themselves, which means no separate stick or box at all.
Can I use digital signage with just one screen?
Yes, and it's a sensible way to start. Pick the screen that's hardest to keep up to date by hand, which for a lot of cafes and pubs is the menu. You can add more screens to the same account later and run them all from one login.
Do I need to be good at design?
Not really. Casty has templates to start from and a drag-and-drop editor, and if you already have posters made in a design app you can upload them as images and schedule them as they are. Short words and big text get you most of the way.
Can my staff change what's on the screens?
They can have their own logins, each limited to what that person needs. A bar manager might only be able to change one promotions playlist, while a site manager can schedule content for their own venue. We set the logins up for you.