u/514sid

There are 600+ signage vendors out there, and they all do the same base thing: push content to a screen on a schedule. The features on top change from vendor to vendor, but the core is identical. So the real question isn't features, it's whether the vendor built things properly. A lot of them haven't: old stacks, dependencies untouched for years, security as an afterthought.

I'd filter on tech and security first.

Android is the most common platform, and it shows the tech problem well. Many vendors just give you an APK to sideload onto a smart TV, which is fine until you need to update it, because there's no way to push updates remotely. Then you're reinstalling by hand on every screen (if the vendor actually even updates it). The setups that hold up either use a proper store or a device in device-owner mode (which isn't the case on Android TV) with built-in OTA updates, which is rare.

Past that, the things worth comparing: how often it actually updates (new versions, patches, bug fixes, or frozen the day you bought it), how well it runs on your hardware, and whether it's a marketing company with tech bolted on or a real tech team building what they're good at. That last one usually predicts the rest.

This is also why I wouldn't dismiss the newer "vibe coded" apps. Something built quickly on a modern stack can easily beat an old product that gives you an app bundling an outdated version of Chromium to run on your Windows mini PC. Brand age isn't the same as being well built.

So for a simple setup: don't compare feature lists, compare how it updates, what it runs on, and who's behind it.

Went through the actual post and comment history here instead of just going on a feeling.

Almost every thread gets answered mostly by the same handful of vendor accounts pushing their own product, thread after thread, and none of it actually helps.

I've been kicking around an idea and want to hear what you all think before doing anything with it.

Make this more of a knowledge-sharing place: for people who work in the industry, sure, but just as much for people who are curious, running their own screens and want advice on content or use cases, or just want to know how something works. Steer it away from being a place vendors sell into.

Concretely:

• No recommendation threads for commercial products, and no "how do I do this in [product]" questions either, those belong in a support ticket with the vendor, not here. Open source stays fair game for both, since anyone here can actually help with that.
• No product pitches, from anyone. Share how you'd approach something, not "At X we do it this way," the company doesn't need to be in the comment.
• No repeating "Disclosure: I work at X" either. Most of the time that's really just an ad with a disclaimer stapled on, not much real value in it. Want people to know where you work? Get the flair, that's what it's for. The one exception is vendor-to-vendor threads, or situations where who you work for actually changes what you're saying and it's worth mentioning.
• Hardware discussion stays welcome, especially players that work across CMS platforms rather than locking you into one, like BrightSign or Amazon Signage Stick. A hardware bundle that only works with one company's software is a different case.
• Open-source releases, free materials like books and guides, and community directories are all still welcome. A free tier on a commercial product isn't the same thing though, that gets treated as promotion.
• More room for photos and videos of your own installs, interesting setups you spotted in the wild or at an expo, new hardware and tech worth knowing about, market and industry talk, educational content. And the everyday stuff too, like a photo of your cafe asking where to mount a screen or what would actually work there.

I'm trying to track down a Scala Media Player-Q and having no luck. Every reseller I've found is out of stock. eBay currently has zero Q listings too

So I'm hoping someone here can help. Does anyone know a distributor or reseller that actually has Q units on the shelf and not just listed? Or maybe someone is sitting on a spare from a decommissioned deployment and would be willing to sell it.

New or used both work for me, US-based preferred, and either the Windows or Ubuntu variant is fine.

Happy to take this to DMs.

Disclosure: I'm writing this as a product manager at Screenly, not in my capacity as a mod of this sub.

At Screenly, we're really committed to giving back to the community through open and free projects. Anthias, our open source signage player, is the most popular digital signage software on GitHub by star count, and we contribute back to open source wherever we can.

Now we're building free apps.

We just launched signage-apps.com through Screenly Labs, and it's deliberately not a Screenly product. No login, no account, no trial, nothing to buy into. You pick an app, copy the link, and paste it into whatever you're already running.

The library currently has 47 apps, everything from clocks and weather to auto-rotating news headlines, all built by u/mvip. Head to the site to explore what's available.

Why we built it:

We've had a simple clock and weather app running on their own subdomains for years, originally built for Anthias users. When we finally looked at the traffic, we were surprised: over a single 24-hour window the clock served 1.22M requests and the weather app 1.68M, from dozens of countries. Turns out there's real demand for free, no-strings signage content that just works, and most of that traffic had nothing to do with our products at all.

So instead of folding these into a paid product, we spun them out as a standalone community project. It's free, there are no SLAs or roadmaps, and we plan to keep adding apps based on what people actually ask for.

How you can help:

• Try it on your setup and let us know what breaks or what's missing
• Request apps you'd like to see

Blog post with the full backstory: https://www.screenly.io/blog/2026/07/02/free-digital-signage-app-library/

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.

New logo and visual refresh across the whole site. Mobile experience is now properly usable: filter modal, cleaner layout, no more broken views on small screens.

Also added a Free & Freemium section that filters products by open source or no upfront cost, which was one of the more common things people were looking for.

Under the hood the filtering and navigation got a lot of work too. Breadcrumbs now carry context when you navigate from a category or platform page, active filters show as removable pills, and pagination scrolls you back to the top instantly on page change.

559+ digital signage software products. No ads, no vendor bias, all data public on GitHub.

signagelist.org

Feel free to share any feedback on what can be improved.

Earlier this year I joined Screenly as a Product Manager. One of the first things Viktor, our CEO, and I agreed on was that basic digital signage should be open source.

There are 500+ digital signage products out there. Self-hosted ones? Very few.

Before Screenly, I spent almost a year building Screenlite solo. It was meant to be a small digital signage ecosystem: a CMS, software players, and standalone tools like an Android kiosk browser. That experience made one thing very clear: maintaining an open source project on the side is hard. That’s why so many of them get abandoned. It takes real time and energy, and most maintainers have full-time jobs.

Joining Screenly felt like a way to stop building yet another project and instead invest that effort into Anthias. It is already the most starred self-hosted signage project on GitHub, and it deserves proper time and care.

Then reality kicked in.

After I joined, I got pulled into internal work almost immediately. The big plans I had for Anthias just stalled. Even with a company behind it, open source still has to fight for time and focus.

A few months in, Viktor started pushing a lot of PRs to Anthias. Then he cut a new release without much noise around it. After that, he messaged me: "We need to tell people about this".

So here we are.

What is Anthias?

Anthias has been around since 2012 and is mostly maintained by Screenly.

It’s a self-hosted digital signage solution where the API server runs directly on the device displaying the content. If you have a few screens and want something reliable with scheduling, without handing control to a third party, it’s straightforward to set up and you own everything.

What’s in this release?

Quite a bit:

• Per-asset scheduling is finally here. You can set each asset to show on specific days and times.
• Working hardware video playback on Pi 4 (64-bit) and Pi 5.
• The architecture was slimmed down.
• Dependency upgrades to Django 5.2 LTS, Python 3.13, and Debian Trixie.
• A bunch of long-standing bugs fixed.

Full details:
Release post: https://www.screenly.io/blog/2026/05/15/anthias-v2026-05-0/
Changelog: https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/releases/tag/v2026.05.0

On a personal note, this release pushed me to revisit my old Screenlite drafts.

Screenlite probably will not ship as a standalone project. The current idea is to merge parts of it into Anthias, possibly as a centralized CMS to manage multiple Anthias installations. I am still exploring how that should look.

But the original motivation has not changed. I still want open source digital signage to exist and be viable.

Happy to answer questions.

Viktor (u/mvip) and I are both watching the thread.