Split Screen Without the Mess: Sixteen Layouts and When to Draw Your Own

16 Sept 2026

We have rebuilt the Signital portal from the sign-in page to the display page. The nouns are the same: displays, channels, playlists, media and widgets. What changed is how quickly you can answer the two questions every screen operator asks: is everything online, and what is each screen playing? Here is a walk through what is new, and the thinking behind it. A Dashboard That Starts With Fleet Health The first page after you sign in is now the Dashboard. It opens with an uptime ring showing the share of your displays that are online, followed by the counts: online, offline and not yet connected. Displays that have never connected are left out of the ring, so an install in progress does not read as downtime. Below it, Needs attention lists only the displays that were online and then dropped out, each with its location and how long it has been gone. Click a row and you are on that display’s page. If nothing is wrong, the card says so: Everything is online. Every location then gets a card with its own health bar and the displays in it, each marked Online, Offline or Not connected together with the channel it follows. Give each display a location under Settings and the Dashboard groups them by site for you. A Live Wall for the Whole Fleet Open live wall at the bottom of the sidebar opens Live Overview: every display grouped by location, refreshed every 30 seconds. Cards shows a preview of the channel each display follows with its status pill. Compact shrinks each display to a dot and a name so a fleet of hundreds fits on one page, and each location heading gets an offline count when any are down. One honest detail: the card preview is the channel the display follows, not a photograph of the panel. The portal never claims to know what a screen shows at this exact second, because no signage system reliably can. Live preview on the display page renders the published plan exactly as the player does. Pair a Screen in Five Characters, or One Scan The player on a new device shows a 5-character code and a QR code. In the portal you open the display, press Connect and type the code into five cells; the fifth character submits it. Or scan the QR code with your phone, tap the display it should become, and you are done. The scanned route can even create the display for you. Codes never contain the letter O or the digit 0, so there is nothing to misread, and a device left waiting gets a fresh code every 45 minutes. The steps are identical on Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, Android, Fire TV, BrightSign, Raspberry Pi and in a web browser at signital.tv. Draft First, Publish When You Are Ready Every edit to a plan is now a draft. Add items, reorder them, change the layout, and the display keeps playing what it had. Cards and pages carry an Unpublished pill until you press Publish changes, at which point every display following that plan fetches the new version within a few seconds. This is the change we hear the most about. You can rebuild a whole channel during the working day and release it in one go, and a half-finished menu never appears on a wall. The Preview card shows the draft; Live preview shows what is playing right now. A Setup Panel That Reads Your Workspace New workspaces get a Set up Signital panel at the bottom of the sidebar with four required steps: workspace, display, connection and first content. It ticks steps by looking at your workspace, not by recording clicks, so a display added by a colleague ticks the step for everyone. When you are live, it turns into a short list of suggestions, each with a Show me where button that takes you to the right page. Two Plans, Clearly Marked Workspaces are on the Standard or the Business plan. Business adds proof-of-play analytics, custom layouts, custom fonts, the Display status widget, and Reboot device and Screen schedule in Manage device. Locked features stay visible with a lock and an Upgrade button, so you can see what Business adds before you switch. An upgrade unlocks everything immediately and is billed at the Business rate from your next renewal. What Did Not Change Channels still let any number of displays follow one plan. Playlists are still built once and dropped into any plan as a single row. All 19 widget types are on both plans, and every upload to Media still becomes a widget of the same name that you can schedule straight away. The documentation at docs.signital.com now describes every page of the portal, screen by screen.

14 Sept 2026

Most questions we get in support come down to one thing: where should this content go? Signital keeps the answer small. There are three containers, each solves a different problem, and once you see the pattern you stop thinking about it. First, the path every item takes. You upload media or configure a widget. You add it to a scheduled plan, which says what plays, in what order and when. The plan belongs to a display or a channel. You press Publish changes. The player fetches the published plan and plays it. The Display’s Own Plan Every display has a plan of its own, so you never need to create anything else to get a single screen going. Add a display, connect it, press Add to plan, publish. A reception screen that shows the visitor welcome and the weather, and nothing else anywhere, belongs here. Use it when one display shows something only it shows. The moment a second screen should show the same thing, stop and read on, because copying items between displays is how menus drift apart. A Channel for Everything Shared A channel is a plan that many displays can follow at once. Put the lunch menu on a channel, point ten displays at it, and they play the same thing. Edit the channel once and press Publish changes, and all ten update within seconds. A display follows exactly one channel at a time, and the channel page tells you how many do: Active on 10 displays, 9 online. Channels are orientation-specific, so a landscape channel is only offered to landscape displays. They also carry the transition between items, from Crossfade to Slide, and the layout when you split the screen. When you add a display you can pick its channel in the same dialog, so a new store opens on the right content before anyone has touched it. A Playlist for Sequences You Reuse A playlist is an ordered run of content you build once and drop into any plan as a single item. Ten seasonal promotions become one row on the channel, and updating the playlist updates every channel and display that plays it. On the plan it shows as one row with a Playlist badge, its items nested underneath and a duration summed from them. Reach for a playlist when the same sequence belongs in several channels, or when a channel is getting long and you want to manage a campaign as one thing. A playlist cannot contain another playlist, and it is authored for one orientation. The Mixed Case: Same Everywhere, Except Here Twelve branches share a brand channel, but one branch runs a local event this week. Do not fork the channel. Leave eleven on the channel and take the twelfth off it with Remove channel on its display page; its own plan resumes. Drop the shared content in as a playlist, add the local item, publish. Next week, Connect to channel again and it is back in line. Alternatively, keep the branch on the channel and put the shared content in a playlist that also carries the local item on a schedule. Which you choose depends on whether the exception is a week or a way of life. Schedules Stack An item inside a playlist can have a schedule, and the playlist row on the plan has one too. The item plays only when both agree. A promotion set to 08:00 to 12:00 inside a playlist the plan shows from 10:00 to 18:00 plays from 10:00 to 12:00. If the two windows never overlap, the item never plays, and nothing warns you, so check the plan preview. What Publish Changes Covers On a display page: the display’s own plan, and the shared channel it follows if any. Every display following that channel is affected. On a channel page: the channel’s plan and layout, for every display following it. On a playlist page: the playlist’s items, for every channel and display that plays it. Before you publish a shared channel or a playlist, glance at its Active on line. That number is how many screens are about to change. A Quick Rule of Thumb One display, unique content: the display’s own plan. Several displays, same content: a channel. Same content everywhere, one display needs a variation: a channel for the rest, that display on its own plan. A sequence you want inside several channels: a playlist.

11 Sept 2026

A menu board is the simplest signage there is, and it is where scheduling earns its keep. Breakfast until 11, lunch until 14, the evening menu after that, and a promotion whenever nothing else is due. Here is how to build exactly that in Signital, and the handful of rules that make schedules behave. Always Show or Scheduled Every item you add to a plan ends with the same step, Set the schedule. Always show keeps the item in the rotation whenever the plan is active. Scheduled reveals three panels: Date range, Time of day and Weekdays. The item plays only when all three agree. Time of day is set in 15-minute steps. A To time earlier than the From time is an overnight window, so 22:00 to 06:00 plays from ten in the evening until six the next morning. Weekdays are seven buttons, all on by default; switch off the days the item should not play. The Worked Example Add the promotion image with Always show. This is what plays whenever nothing else claims the screen. Add the lunch menu with Scheduled. Leave Date range off, set Time of day to 11:00 to 14:00, and switch off Saturday and Sunday. Switch on Take over. During its window the menu plays alone; everything else in the section waits. Add the breakfast menu the same way, 07:00 to 11:00, and the evening menu, 17:00 to 22:00, both with Take over. Press Add to plan for each, then Publish changes once. Until then the board keeps showing what it had. Between 11:00 and 14:00 on a weekday the board shows only the lunch menu. From 14:00 to 17:00 the promotion runs. If the lunch menu is a playlist of three boards, one row on the plan carries all three and the schedule applies to the playlist as a whole. Take Over Is the Key Switch Without Take over, a scheduled item simply joins the rotation during its window, so the lunch menu would alternate with the promotion. That is the right behaviour for a campaign you want to mix in. For a menu, an opening-hours notice or a fire-drill message, Take over is what you want. When the window ends, the section returns to its normal rotation on its own. Dates for Campaigns, Not for Menus The Date range panel is for content with a start and an end: a two-week offer, a holiday greeting, a supplier’s launch. Set From and To and the item plays from the start of the first day to the end of the last, then drops out of the rotation without anyone remembering to remove it. Leave it off for anything that repeats weekly. Durations, and Why Videos Ignore Them Duration is how many seconds an item stays up each time its turn comes. Images and most widgets take the number you give them, prefilled from your Playback defaults or from what the widget knows about itself, so a News widget proposes stories times slide duration. Video, YouTube and Vimeo items play to the end regardless, and a section with a single video loops it. Whose Clock Is It? Schedules are read in your workspace time zone, unless the display has a location with its own. Give each site a location under Settings and the lunch menu shows at 11 local time in every city. Widgets that display a time, such as Date & Time and the calendars, take a time zone from their own settings. Never Let the Board Go Blank A section with no active item shows the default widget from Settings, an image or video you choose once for landscape and once for portrait. Set one before you build a tight schedule. Without it, the gap between the evening menu ending at 22:00 and breakfast at 07:00 is a black screen, or the Signital logo. A schedule that ends never breaks anything; the section falls back to its always-on items, and then to the default. Change the Menu Without Touching the Board A dish sells out: open the playlist, remove one row, Publish changes. Every board that plays the playlist updates within seconds. Prices change on the first of the month: open the image in Media and Replace the file, and the widget keeps its place on every plan. None of it needs a ladder or a USB stick.