Proof of Play: Knowing What Your Screens Actually Showed

Publishing content is an act of faith. You press the button, the portal says Successfully published, and somewhere a screen you cannot see starts playing it. Proof of play replaces the faith with a record: what did each display play, for how long, and how long was it online. In Signital it is part of the Business plan, and this is how it works.

Switching It On

Two things must be true before anything is recorded. The workspace is on the Business plan, and the Proof-of-play analytics switch under Settings is on. Recording starts the moment the switch goes on and there is no data for the time before, so switch it on the day you upgrade if you want a full month.

What You See

The Analytics page in the sidebar opens with a Period selector, from Today to Last 30 days, and two figures: Total played time across every display, and Online displays, meaning how many different displays played something in the period. Then two tabs.

The Displays tab lists each display with its location, hours and minutes of content played, its share of the period spent online as a bar, and when it last checked in. The Widgets tab lists each widget with its type, play count, total time on a display and how many displays showed it, with a filter to narrow the list to one widget type. Details on any row opens that display’s or widget’s own page.

When the Figures Appear

Displays send their playback logs through the day, but the figures are built once a night, shortly after 04:00 UTC, from the previous day’s logs. Yesterday and everything earlier are complete from the morning after. Today stays mostly empty until tomorrow. Figures are kept for 70 days, so Last 30 days and Last month always fit, and anything older is gone.

The One Live Page

View logs on a display’s analytics page opens the log of player activity for the last 24 hours, and it is live: press Refresh and the latest rows arrive. Each row is one item played with its type, duration, start and finish. Between them, full-width rows mark what happened on the device: Player connected, Synced successfully, Network error, and a striped row for any gap with nothing playing, timed to the second.

This is the page to open when someone reports a blank or stuck screen. It shows whether the player was running, whether it fetched the latest publish, and whether items were completing. Most "the screen is broken" calls end here in under a minute.

Who Needs This

• Anyone selling screen time. A partner who paid for 200 plays a day can see 200 plays a day, per display, from the Widgets tab.
• Franchise and multi-site operators. The Displays tab shows which sites actually ran the campaign and which were dark, without asking anyone.
• Operations teams. Online share per display, over a month, is the honest uptime figure for a screen network.
• Marketing. Which of the twelve promotions in the playlist actually got airtime, and on how many screens.

What Is Deliberately Not Counted

Time when a display shows its default widget because nothing is scheduled is not attributed to any widget, so it does not appear under Widgets played. A playlist counts its items, not itself. And time while the switch was off is missing entirely; turning it back on does not recover it.

If You Move Back to Standard

A downgrade takes effect at your next renewal. Analytics then leaves the sidebar and stops recording. Existing data is kept for the retention period but cannot be viewed, so export or screenshot the reports you need before the renewal date.