Many restaurants, retailers and hotels work on a weekly schedule. They are open every day and have different promotions and possibly different hours on each day of the week. Digital signs can display the appropriate media for each day and you can schedule your whole week in advance.
You can schedule more than a week in advance if you want to, but since so many customers work on a weekly basis, this paper describes an easy way to set up a repeating one week period. The basic steps in programming digital signs are:
- Select the template you will use for your screen layout; portrait or landscape, and number of zones.
- Upload your media; videos, pictures and text files.
- Create playlists; decide which pictures go into each zone on your screen.
- Schedule when each playlist will be displayed on each screen.
If all you want to do is create a program that plays every day until you change it, you are now finished. But if you want to create a different program for the next seven days you need to add another step:
5. Advanced scheduling.
To use advanced scheduling you need to upload your media and create your playlists for each future day and then tell the system which playlist to play on each date and what time of the day to turn on and off. As your week goes by, you need to be working on the next week and continue to add new future playlists.
An easier way is to create a seven day schedule organized by day of the week so once the advanced scheduling is set up we won’t have to change it. If we create a playlist for Monday and schedule it to play every Monday; it will. Likewise we can have a repeating playlist every day of the week with each playing on its designated day. Now when we make changes in what we want to display, all we need to do is change the playlists by adding new media and removing outdated media but we won’t have to change the advanced schedule. We will just be working with steps two and three above. We can also change our screen layout, step one, by changing templates if we want to.
Here is an example of how you can use this method. I will create seven playlists called “Weekly_Monday” through “Weekly_Sunday”. I will then set up seven daily templates which I will also name “Weekly_Monday” through “Weekly_Sunday”. They don’t have to be named the same. A daily template defines which playlist is displayed on that day. Once programmed, the seven playlists will each be displayed on their day of the week and the sequence will repeat until you change it.
We will use a portrait screen with one video zone, four JPEG zones and a text scroller. Each JPEG we upload must be sized correctly for its zone. The system told us how many pixels high and wide each picture needed to be when we chose the template. When we upload media to our library, we always select which position on the screen we are uploading to so the system can retrieve it.
Next we create seven daily templates to schedule our seven daily playlists. Mouse over the “Playlist Schedule” tab and “Advanced Scheduling” appears. Mouse over Advanced Scheduling and three more options appear. Select “Create Daily Template”.
This completes the process and your weekly schedule will now be in effect. When you have created a weekly or advanced schedule of any kind it takes priority over a normal daily schedule. Normal daily schedules will no longer work once you have assigned a sign to an advanced schedule. To make changes in your program all you need to do is change the daily playlists; “Weekly_Monday” through “Weekly_Sunday”. To remove a sign from the weekly schedule, create a new daily schedule by selecting the sign you want to change and change the schedule to “Blank/Default Schedule”.
