How to Roll out Digital Signage Screens over Multiple Locations

Pushing content to one screen is easy enough. You could cast slides with a Chromecast. Connect an HDMI cable to a laptop. Even a USB drive with slides saved as images could get the job done for the short term.

Now add four more screens throughout your workplace. You’d need to take out the USB drives from each screen, copy over new slides, then plug them back in every time. Or you’d need four more computers to cast content to each screen.

What about the other office across town? A branch office in another city, or a warehouse across the country? 

The more digital signage screens you roll out across your business, the more a digital signage platform makes sense. With a centralized hub to build slides, integrate with the software your team already uses, and schedule content to play when you want, a tool like ScreenCloud is the smart way to manage even a single office screen. It saves exponentially more time the more screens and locations you add to your digital signage network.

“I've been able to communicate effectively across locations without needing to make all the regular visits I used to make,” says McDonald’s franchisee Steven Nisbet Jr after building out a multiple location digital signage network with ScreenCloud.

Here’s how you can get those same time savings and make signage a success as you scale from one screen to eleven or a hundred.

Choose Hardware That Works Together

The average TV today is 4K resolution, with HDMI ports for content and VESA mount holes to hang it on the wall. That industry standardization takes a lot of the hard work out of deploying digital signage across locations. If you’re buying new screens and want to keep things consistent, professional displays typically include options to copy and restore settings across displays, something that could be worth considering so you don’t have to set brightness, orientation, and more on each screen.

Where you will need to make more decisions is around media player hardware and digital signage software. We recommend one of two routes: A Chromecast with Google TV or Amazon Signage Stick for a consumer-focused device that can also run signage apps.

Or a professional signage device like our ScreenCloud OS-powered Station P1 Pro with ethernet, enterprise network support, provisioning, and remote device management. You can also get the very affordable ScreenCloud PIXI media player for powerful signage for less.

The Chromecast works well for smaller signage deployments where costs are the key consideration.

But when deploying screens across multiple locations, it’s worth standardizing on professional signage players for consistent remote management so you don’t have to travel to each location to update devices and work around OS updates. Plus, if each of your company screens use the same player, it’s easy to replace devices or talk another team member through the setup process when needed.

Depending on your company’s needs and IT deployment stack, using Windows PCs to power your screens could be another way to standardize signage. Use the same Windows image that you use for your team’s PCs, with ScreenCloud’s Windows signage software and any signage-specific networking settings included. You could use either repurposed desktop computers or mini PCs hidden behind TVs, thin clients connected to signage, Open pluggable Specification (OPS) devices connected to professional displays, or custom desktop PCs with video cards to power video walls. That would also give you a consistent platform for signage across your company.

Or, you could go with what you have. If your companies TVs already have built-in Android, WebOS, or Tizen, or you have existing BrightSign, Fire stick, or Zoom Rooms-compatible devices, or even an iPad as touch-screen signage, you can install ScreenCloud player apps and power your signage with the same software across every device. That diversity is why Choate Construction picked ScreenCloud. “Dozens of different devices support ScreenCloud, and having that flexibility was helpful because I wasn’t going to need to be in-person to help our teams set up the hardware,” said their internal communications specialist Jon Micheletto.

For the largest hardware deployments of dozens of screens across multiple locations at once, consider a dedicated signage hardware vendor like ScreenCloud partner Promevo to help manage a digital signage rollout.

Tip: Learn more about choosing and rolling out signage hardware in our free eBook, The IT Team’s Guide to Signage.

Use a Digital Signage Platform to Manage Screens

With your screens powered up, it’s time to turn them into a cohesive digital signage network—even across multiple locations.

In ScreenCloud, there are three ways to organize your screens: Spaces, Screen Groups, and Tags.

Screen Groups and Tags are the best way to build a cohesive screen network across all of your company’s locations. Each are essentially quick ways to assign content to a set of screens. Groups are best for grouping screens at a single location; one group for your headquarters, another for your satellite office, another for a warehouse, and so on. Tags, then, let you add details about how those screens are used. Add a Lobby tag to the lobby screens at your headquarters and other offices, a breakroom tag to every screen near a water-cooler or cafeteria.

To add groups and tags, open ScreenCloud’s Screens tab, then either click the New Screen Group to add a group, or underneath any screen’s name click the Add a Tag button to add a new tag.

Then, you can push content to a group of screens or all screens with a tag at once. For groups, click the number of screens beside a group to select all of its screens, then click the cast icon to set content.

For tags, click the tag name along the top of the Screens page, then select each screen that includes the tag, and set the content as before. It’s like treating all of your screens as one, setting content together in a single click.

Now whenever you build out channels or playlists for your entire company to see, you can push them out to all of your screens—or a specific subset you want—at once. All you need is a browser—you could be a thousand miles away and still add new company announcements to the lobby TV with ScreenCloud.

Or, for more location-specific control, use Spaces. Spaces let you split your ScreenCloud account into entirely unique sections, each with their own content, apps, playlists, channels, and screens. They’re great for companies where you want each location to manage their own content, while still being connected to the same ScreenCloud account. Each space has its own screens (with unique groups and tags), along with unique content.

There’s still a way to push content between spaces, though, for company announcements that every location should see. Create your app integration, slide, playlist, or channel, then click the Share button (typically in a menu, or a people icon on a toolbar). There you can choose to share that item with other spaces, and optionally let the other team edit your channel or playlist as well. You can’t push the content to a specific TV—you’ll need to switch to their space to do that—but it keeps you from duplicating the work in creating the content.

Create Signage Content For Each and Every Location

Speaking of content, that’s the final consideration with building out your digital signage network across multiple locations. You need consistent branding and messaging, along with the flexibility for each location to add additional content as needed.

Start with your company’s branding. Jump into your ScreenCloud settings, and from the Look & Feel tab add your brand colors, logo, and other design elements that match your company style. ScreenCloud will tweak your app integrations to match that branding automatically. For everything else—including slides you make in Canvas or code in Playgrounds—keep your branding in mind for effective communication design with consistent-looking designs that your team will over time come to recognize as your Company TV channel.

Then, think about the content needs for each location. A few offices or shops in the same city might all need essentially the same content. Offices spread across cities, though, would have different needs. You might want the same core messages from HR, but with each city’s own Weather app and local news headlines for localized content that makes people want to look at your screens. For companies spread across the country or the globe, you might need content in multiple languages, set at localized time zones. And for those with different types of locations—a mix of offices and shipping centers, say—you’ll need different types of content for each facility.

Along with that, local offices will want to add custom slides. Their in-house team will know when a local fire drill will happen, say, and you don’t want to have to make that slide yourself. You can assign team members to specific spaces, so they can change signage at their location but not across your full company for additional security.

Pro Tip: An easy win is to display live tv with your digital signage to provide entertainment and keep your screens occupied with relevant content.

Maintaining digital signage across multiple locations

The best large digital signage rollout involves people at each location. You can centrally manage signage and pull together the bulk of the content. Then, show a local team member around ScreenCloud, so they can add slides to their office’s playlists. 

They can be your point-person for maintaining digital signage, too.

For the most part, your TVs and media players should run on their own for their estimated lifespan. You can monitor uptime from ScreenCloud, and even check software versions, clear caches, or restart devices remotely if using a ScreenCloud Station P1 Pro device.

Consider having a standardized Slack channel, email inbox, or other support route where team members at any location can let you know if screens are having an issue. And enlist your point person to take an occasional photo of their location’s screens and share them in that Slack channel. That’ll help you notice issues—bright spots or burn-in on screens, say—as they crop up so you’ll only have to visit locations when necessary.

Scale your digital signage network with your business

With 53 locations spread across Canada, and with deskless workers making up a majority of their workforce, communications is challenging for logistics firm GLS. “Having so many employees spread far apart, our team is not necessarily in the loop of what's going on across the organization,” said GLS director of marketing Stacey Yunger. With centrally-managed digital signage, though, Yunger and team could build slides in one location and broadcast them across every company location as easily as adding slides to a single display.

Build out your digital signage network thoughtfully, and you’ll be able to scale your screens as needed. As your company grows into an enterprise, you’ll eventually have additional considerations for enterprise signage with 100+ screens. You’ll need to consider professional displays, might use SSO or Auth0 to sign into signage players, and will need a system to keep track of all of your company’s signage content.

For now, start out with consistent hardware, organized screen groups and tags, and branded content, and you’ll be able to easily manage your growing digital signage network—from anywhere.