Creating a Digital Signage TV Channel for Your Company

Flick through Netflix, Apple TV+ or any other TV guide, and you’ll notice how certain channels are segmented into themes, topics and areas of interest, e.g. sport or comedy. 

This is how you should think about ScreenCloud Channels. 

Rather than organizing your content by genre, organize by area of business, like HR or Marketing. You could even organize by location, theme or even campaign type. Channels was introduced as a way to better organize your content and schedule it to show at the right time, to the right people. 

In this guide we’ll show you how Channels work, and the best approach for creating your own.

What are Channels?

Channels in ScreenCloud help you to organize all of your digital signage content by theme, department, user or content type. You might have a Channel that centralizes your “corporate” messaging, then individual Channels for Sales, Marketing or HR. These Channels are made up of Playlists (in this context, think of a Playlist like a TV show).

Playlists

With Playlists, every single piece of content gets shown and anyone with editing access can change anything in the list. This means that if you have 50 screens playing your corporate Playlist, and someone makes a change, that goes out everywhere (unless you set certain restrictions / permissions). 

With Channels you get the option to nest content which creates far greater control, both in terms of who can edit what but also in terms of what type of content you show where.

Let's give you an example.

You might have a “corporate” Playlist that gets created by your People team. This needs to be shared with every employee, regardless of their location or job role. This is a great way to ensure that important announcements, reminders and training tools get disseminated to all employees, regardless of where they are. Maybe you can find creative ways to communicate information to employees.

Channels vs. Playlists

But what happens if you have multiple screens across different locations? As well as showing your corporate Playlist, you might also want to create some localized content, like location-specific events, announcements or travel updates. 

This is where you should consider Channels vs. Playlists.

To create localized content for a multi-location firm, first create the overall corporate Playlist and your local team can add this to their Channel. (For other considerations for Enterprise-level businesses, click here.)

Benefits of ScreenCloud Channels

Aside from being able to organize content, Channels have many other benefits, including:

Target your content to the right people, at the right time

The more targeted content is, the more likely it is to retain attention. This then increases the impact that content has. Imagine working as a Software Developer and having to watch a marketing message every time you go to make a coffee. Now imagine that message was giving you a real time status update of your business-critical performance systems, or a countdown to how many days you have left until your security audit.

That makes the screen content relatable and useful. It also helps build a data-driven culture. It’s a powerful thing, sharing business-critical information securely to the people who can actually do something with it. 

In consumer-facing settings, like coffee shops or stores, Channels can be used as a marketing tool. You might have general promotional messaging that gets played all year round, but with Channels, you can combine this with your calendar-specific campaigns that can be scheduled to pop up and disappear when necessary.

You can also add a social media Playlist to your Channel, showing customer reviews, mentions and photos. Tools like Taggbox and Walls.io can integrate all your feeds and show user-generated content too. 

Make incremental changes

Channels can also play on multiple screens at once, which means if you need to make a sudden change or edit,  you only need to update the Channel for all the screens to follow suit.

This means that you can change content without needing to change the structure of your screens. For example, swapping out a Playlist or an element within a Playlist won’t affect everyone using that Channel the way it might if you had to change the entire list of content.

Channels also give you the ability to change how your screen looks, preview the content that’s playing right now, and add custom themes all from one location.

You can try out using Channels yourself by starting a free trial today at screencloud.com/freetrial.

Reach remote workforces

Since COVID-19 more employees than ever are working remotely and from home. Without those in-office screens keeping everyone updated – and with more communications happening across online mediums like Slack, email and MS Teams – the amount of noise employees are exposed to is at an all time high.

Which made us question: how can you keep remote employees connected and on top of what’s most important in an ambient way?

Embeddable Channels

This is a new feature within Channels that we developed so that you can share real-time updates in a company TV Channel or Playlist while employees work from home. Employees don’t need any special hardware to be able to view the updates. Channels can be viewed in a browser, simply by entering a URL, on a second screen. It can even be embedded in an intranet such as Confluence.

Any time you make an update to your Channel, this gets published instantly, so employees can always view the latest news, announcements and data – especially when paired with our secure Dashboards feature. 

This is a great way to keep remote employees feeling connected and on top of what's most important, without having to constantly be checking different locations.

Head here to see more examples of using Embeddable Channels to reach remote workforces and to request access within your ScreenCloud account.