r/digitalsignage

I don’t post on Reddit much, so apologies in advance if this isn’t the right place for this question.

Part of my role at a large enterprise involves building and managing digital signage. Right now, we have a mixed environment:

• ~150 externally managed displays
• ~50–100 internally managed displays

For our internal-only screens, we typically use Raspberry Pi devices running webpages in kiosk mode. For external-facing content, we use a digital signage/content management vendor (keeping them anonymous for now) that handles communications and metrics content hosted in blob storage.

Overall, uptime has been solid (99%+), but we’ve recently started reevaluating the platform due to a few growing concerns:

1. The vendor is based overseas and relies on AWS infrastructure in Ireland. Since we operate across multiple US states, we’ve had to make geo-blocking exceptions and other network accommodations that create operational overhead.
2. The company recently replaced most of its sales and technical support processes with an AI chatbot. This has become a major pain point for enterprise workflows. Something as simple as getting a quote for additional licenses required multiple emails and took nearly three weeks because the bot couldn’t properly handle PR/PO/quote processes.
3. We’re currently dealing with a technical issue that appears to have little or no documentation, and the AI support flow has not been effective at resolving it. That’s raising concerns about long-term enterprise support viability.

A few questions for others managing signage at scale:

1. Are there enterprise-grade digital signage platforms you’d recommend that are more US-centric and don’t rely heavily on overseas infrastructure/support?
2. Are most signage vendors moving toward AI-only support models, or are there still providers offering strong human enterprise support?
3. What platforms do you feel best support a hybrid environment of both on-prem and externally managed displays?
4. At roughly 250 total displays, would most vendors consider us “enterprise” scale, or are we still relatively small compared to typical business customers?

Would appreciate hearing what others are using and what experiences you’ve had — especially around support quality and scalability.

Hello,

I am new to this community and I stumbled apon it looking for an answer to my question. I just bought a Samsung BEFX-H Business TV for my cafe thinking that I would be able to do a split screen type of setup where 1/4 of the screen could be used to show a product video, and the other 3/4 could be used to display my menu.

Using the samsung business TV app it appears that I can only place only static images or only videos. Is there any way to split the screen without buying a computer to display the content?

Thanks for all the help and i'm sorry if this is an already answered/stupid question but checking the history I wasn't able to find an answer.

We rolled out Apple TVs across several store locations for digital signage and it worked well until we had to actually manage them.

Content showing wrong things. Devices knocked out of kiosk mode. Store staff accidentally changing settings. And fixing any of it meant either calling the store or sending someone there.

With 10+ locations that just does not scale.

We eventually got this under control using MDM specifically for Apple TV. Locked each device into a single app, pushed content updates remotely, set it so staff cannot change anything. Zero site visits for screen issues now.

What are others using for this? Curious if there is a better approach or if anyone else ran into the same headaches.

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.

A lot of touchscreen kiosks I see in retail, museums, and public spaces still seem to run on browser based signage stacks that were originally made for passive screens. They work fine until you add real interaction, then you start seeing laggy touch response, weird session behavior, scrolling issues, or hardware integration problems.

Wondering what people are using once projects move beyond simple signage loops....thanks

Hello folks. Looking for opinion on Chinese LED display suppliers.

 

I am currently looking for LED display suppliers located in Guangdong. Unilumin, Absen, Ledman are some big names I found through Google. Also, there are other recommended options like Chainzone that we find their LOB displays could be a good choice.

 

Yet, I have little experience cooperating with Chinese LED display suppliers. Do you have any advice to share, such as important details to check with suppliers or what would be considered a reasonable price range?

 

Any advice is welcome!

Over the past couple months I keep seeing posts about people building "free" or open source digital signage. Some of it might be real work, most it is weekend vibe projects. Not really here to dunk on any of it. We started before vibe coding and trying to keep up.

What I keep thinking about is what this actually means for vendors like us in 24 months. A few possibilities I keep cycling through.

Maybe slow consolidation, smaller vendors get squeezed out as the floor for "good enough" keeps dropping.

Maybe nothing much changes, because distribution, support, and reliability still matter more than feature parity, and a free GitHub project does not solve any of those.

Maybe specialized verticals stay healthy (k12, healthcare, transit) while general-purpose CMS gets commodified into nothing.

Or maybe the dashboard model itself is the thing that shifts. Not just content, but most of the operational layer, alerts, scheduling, device management, eventually moves to something AI handles more directly, and the CMS stops being the center of how this gets run.

idk. Probably some combination, probably none of the above. Anyone seeing buyers ask different questions than they did 12 months ago?

Hello. I’m looking for 2 outdoor digital signages for my business. Location is in Santa Clarita - CA, and screen size is 55”. What are some good options? Budget is around $1k-$2k for each display. I don’t need the software as I’ll use a flash drive.

I'm looking for a device which can run a slideshow across multiple TVs in a few different sites. The slideshow is just webpage but has some dynamic content and animations, it currently runs on Amazon Fire TV sticks fine (it could be smoother performance-wise, but it's acceptable).

I recently moved one of them to an old Raspberry Pi Model 3B that I had because I wanted to get away from all the Amazon branding and adverts, also so that I could run some scripts like making it reboot daily, crash recovery etc. Again, runs fine on the Pi, about the same as the Fire Stick. I also tried a Raspberry Pi 3A+ but it really struggled to run it at all.

I'm needing to expand to more sites so I need to decide what devices I buy, ideally I want to avoid sticking with the Fire Sticks but they seem to be the most affordable. The Raspberry Pi is so expensive now, once you add all the needed extras (case, power supply, SD card, HDMI cable) the Pi 3 Model B is nearly £70, which is hard to justify when the Fire Sitck is £40. Are there any other affordable options that give me the freedom to run what I want as the Pi? It also needs to fit behind a TV.

Edit: should specify if it wasn't clear from the £, I'm in the UK

Just noticing that outdoor signage projects are getting way more demanding lately especially with brightness requirements, weather protection, and keeping content looking consistent across different screen types.

As an signage installer, a few recent installs pushed us into dealing with:

• overheating issues during direct sunlight (Most common)
• brightness inconsistencies between panels
• CMS lag on larger video walls
• unexpected power/network limitations on-site

The technical side is manageable, but honestly the environment and installation conditions are where projects usually get complicated.

Are you with us in this case?

Hi,

Based in UK. We design and deploy content to non-soc screens - external players. Mostly retail. Very simple set up .We've about 75 screens like this. It took me ages to find a reputable and reliable provider for players/CMS. I tried the usual yodeck, now signage and other off the shelf solutions. Support just wasn't there. We liked the current guys as I could pick up the phone any time typically they'd solve the issue. CMS was decent. Generally we'd have no issues. Lately support has been getting poorer. I understand they've bigger clients than us etc. I feel that we've put all our eggs in one basket. I'm looking for anyone in the UK who can provide a similar solution..a decent media player, CMS and support and be reasonable price wise (not a reseller ideally) We're going through a bit of a growth period so really need to find an alternative that can offer a service like this. If this is the wrong place, please remove mods!

Hi all

I work in food and beverage. We are briefing a new agency for a refresh of our screens across all our sites, some of which have different sub-brands and require a different look and feel.

I’m trying to establish a design system where we have a toolkit of template designs that can just be reskinned for different brands. Eg ten different screen layouts but we change the colour, font, imagery etc. Two column text menu, single product focus, meal deal focus etc…

Does anyone know of anywhere that collates best practise advice for screen design? Eg guidance on most effective text size, most impactful image placement, transition times etc?

Was thinking about this the other day. Every industry creates its own acronym soup, and then a bigger industry comes along and steals one of the letters. Tech does it constantly. SSO meant something specific in identity before single sign-on took over. CRM was a customer support workflow before it became Salesforce.

In 2026, MCP means MCP. Model Context Protocol. The thing Anthropic released in November 2024 that lets Claude and ChatGPT call tools and read data through a standardized interface. OpenAI adopted it last March. Microsoft built it into Windows 11. It's basically the USB-C of AI now.

Except in digital signage, where the AI assistants don't always know that.

Tried this in Gemini last week. Asked "what digital signage software supports MCP." It came back with three different interpretations. Mission Control Portal for BrightSign hardware. Media Control Protocol for legacy AV systems. Multi-Channel Protocol for broadcast. Then a small note at the bottom saying "if you mean the new Anthropic protocol, this is very new to the signage industry, you'd probably need custom middleware."

Couple of problems with that answer.

One, "BrightSign Mission Control Portal" isn't a real product. BrightSign's cloud management platform is BSN.Cloud, has been since they announced it in 2019 and launched it at ISE 2020. I think Gemini hallucinated a plausible-sounding name to fit the acronym.

Two, the Model Context Protocol part isn't accurate either. There are at least four signage platforms with MCP servers right now. Screenly launched theirs in January. Revel Digital announced theirs last August. NoviSign has one via Zapier. CastHub has one too (full disclosure, that's us).

Anyway, point isn't which CMS. The bigger thing is that AI assistants are confidently wrong about industry-specific acronyms when the disambiguation hasn't been documented anywhere they're indexing. Been pulling threads on this for a few days, ended up writing a 25-term signage glossary partly to give Google something to index for the MCP question specifically. It's at cast-hub.com/digital-signage-glossary if anyone wants to argue about definitions. The MCP entry has the full disambiguation.

Me and my friends wanted to start a small ad agency. I looked around for digital signage software and found Yodeck — but it was only free for 1 screen. The paid options were way too expensive for what we needed.

So I just built it myself.

It's a simple digital signage tool that lets you:

- Upload ads (images & videos)

- Schedule them by time slots (morning/afternoon/evening)

- Manage multiple screens from a dashboard

- Supports both horizontal (16:9) and vertical (9:16) displays

It's built for my exact use case so it's pretty simple right now. But it works, it's free, and I'd love to know if anyone else finds it useful.

If you have ideas or recommendations for features I should add, please let me know. Happy to hear any feedback!

https://adbook-82ef0.web.app/

Hi. I'm trying to figure out the best option for a TV to use as a menu board in-store.
It should be
- inexpensive, lightweight, large
- able to handle 8-9 hours of daily static content
- easy to use & make changes to menu

We've already got a TV running ads in-store as a moving slideshow running through YouTube, although I'm not sure the same kind of thing will work as well for a static menu. Recommendations?

Can I use this controller as an Android player and install apps on it? When I turn it on, the Android logo appears, but all I see is the cursor and a black screen.