Most people badly overestimate how much storage a screen needs, and a few badly underestimate it. An image-led rotation of eight slides and a short video clip lands at roughly 25MB, which fits into 1GB forty times over. A video-led retail screen that keeps every campaign it has ever run is a different animal, and that is the one that fills a quota.
The number that matters is not the quota. It is what your specific content weighs. Here is the arithmetic, with real file sizes, so you can work out your own answer before you buy anything.
What your content actually weighs
Everything below assumes a Full HD (1920x1080) screen, which is what most deployments are. These are the sizes you get from sensible export settings, not from a phone camera or a designer’s uncompressed master.
| Item | Typical file size | How many fit in 1GB |
|---|---|---|
| 1920x1080 JPEG, quality 80 | 300KB to 800KB | 1,250 to 3,300 |
| 1920x1080 PNG of a photograph | 2MB to 5MB | 200 to 500 |
| 30-second 1080p H.264 clip at 4 to 6 Mbps | 15MB to 22MB | 45 to 66 |
| 60-second 1080p H.264 clip at 4 to 6 Mbps | 30MB to 45MB | 22 to 33 |
| 60-second 4K H.264 clip at 20 to 25 Mbps | 150MB to 190MB | 5 or 6 |
| Text-led PDF, a few pages | under 1MB | over a thousand |
| Custom font file | 100KB to 400KB | thousands |
| 60 seconds of MP3 audio at 128 kbps | about 1MB | about a thousand |
The video maths is not a guess, it is division. A bitrate of 4 Mbps for 30 seconds is 120 megabits, which is 15MB. At 6 Mbps it is 22.5MB. Multiply by two for a minute, and by roughly five for 4K at broadcast-ish settings. Every video decision you make is a bitrate decision wearing different clothes.
Two lines in that table do all the damage. Exporting photographs as PNG instead of JPEG costs you a factor of five for no visible benefit on a screen viewed from three metres. Uploading 4K to a 1080p panel costs you a factor of five for no benefit at all, because the player downscales it before anyone sees it.
A realistic rotation, counted in megabytes
Three screens we see constantly. The numbers are added up rather than estimated.
| Screen | Content | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Office reception, image-led | 8 JPEGs at 500KB, one 30-second clip at 18MB, one PDF at 400KB | about 22MB |
| Café menu board | 12 JPEGs at 600KB, plus a clock and a weather region | about 7MB |
| Retail promo wall, video-led | 8 clips at 30 seconds (160MB), 3 clips at 60 seconds (114MB), 10 JPEGs (6MB) | about 280MB |
The first two are not close to a limit. A reception screen at 22MB uses about 2% of the 1GB included with a standard easyCMS account. You could refresh that entire rotation every month for years and still not fill the quota, even if you were careless about deleting the old files.
The third screen is where it gets interesting. At 280MB it uses roughly a quarter of the 1GB account, which is comfortable for one campaign. The problem is never the first campaign. It is the fourth one, still sitting in the library alongside the first three because nobody deleted them. A video-led screen with a back catalogue is a 5GB proposition, not a 1GB one, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Good to know Deleting a file from the media library gives the space straight back. Most quota problems are not really volume problems, they are housekeeping problems: three years of superseded campaigns nobody ever removed.
What does not touch your storage at all
This is the part people miss, and it changes the answer for a lot of screens. Storage is consumed by files you upload. Content that is fetched live at play time is rendered by the player and stored nowhere in your library.
Costs you nothing:
- HLS streams and live video. The stream is pulled from its source as it plays.
- Webpage and embedded HTML widgets. An intranet page, a booking board, a dashboard.
- RSS tickers, Mastodon feeds, stocks and currencies, Google Traffic Maps.
- Weather, clocks, world clocks and countdowns. These are generated, not stored.
- Calendar from an iCal feed.
- DataSets. The rows live in a table in the CMS, not in your media library, so a price list, a staff rota or a KPI table driven from a CSV costs you no library space. Any image a row points at is a library file and does count. There is more on this in dynamic content with DataSets.
- Layouts, playlists and schedules themselves. The design is a definition, not a file.
Which means a screen built from a weather panel, a live dashboard, an RSS ticker and a DataSet-driven table can run permanently on almost no storage. If that describes your project, stop worrying about the quota. It is not your constraint.
The trade-off is the one we set out in digital signage without internet: everything in that list needs a working connection at the moment it plays, whereas an uploaded file does not. Storage and resilience pull in opposite directions. Choose deliberately.
Ten screens showing the same loop cost the same as one
The single most common misunderstanding about signage storage is that it scales with screen count. It does not.
Your media library is one library. Upload a 20MB video once, schedule it to ten displays, and it counts against your quota once. Each player downloads and caches its own local copy onto the device, but that is the player’s own disk, not your CMS quota. A fifteen-branch chain running one identical corporate loop has exactly the same storage requirement as a single screen in head office.
Storage scales with how much distinct content you make, not with how many screens you own. A five-screen site with one shared rotation is a small storage customer. A single screen with a new video every week and nothing ever deleted is a large one.
Watch out This cuts both ways. If every branch gets its own localised version of the same video, you are back to multiplying. Fifty branch-specific 30-second clips is most of a 1GB quota on its own. Where you can, use one shared video and put the local detail in a text region or a DataSet instead.
What each tier includes
| Tier | Storage | Roughly equivalent to |
|---|---|---|
| easyCMS account, 49€ one-time | 1GB | around 2,000 JPEGs, or 50 thirty-second clips, or a mixed loop with room to spare |
| PRO account, 299€ one-time | 5GB | around 250 thirty-second clips, or several years of monthly video campaigns |
| Enterprise account, 1290€ per year | 20GB | twenty times the standard account |
Two honest notes on that table. Enterprise is the only recurring plan we sell, at 1290€ a year, and the 20GB comes with it rather than being sold separately. And PRO at 299€ is a one-time purchase that also raises you to 25 displays and adds proof-of-play reporting, so nobody buys it for the storage alone. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Encoding: the settings that decide everything
Most storage problems are export problems. Six rules, in order of how much they save.
Match the resolution to the panel. A 1080p screen wants 1920x1080 files. Uploading 4K to it wastes roughly five times the space, costs the player decoding effort it did not need to spend, and looks identical. Only encode 4K when the panel and the player are genuinely 4K.
Encode video as H.264 in an MP4 container, with AAC audio. It is the format every one of our players handles most reliably: Windows, Android, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen. Exotic codecs are where video playback problems come from.
Target 4 to 6 Mbps for 1080p. That is the band where signage content stops looking better as you add bitrate. Motion-heavy footage justifies the top of the range. A slow pan over a product shot does not.
Trim before you upload, not in the playlist. A 90-second clip you only show 20 seconds of still occupies 90 seconds of storage on every player that caches it.
Export photographs as JPEG at quality 80, not PNG. Keep PNG for logos, flat colour and anything needing transparency, where it compresses well and stays small.
Resize images before uploading. A 6000-pixel camera file is a 4MB upload that the CMS shows on a 1920-pixel screen. Exporting it at 1920x1080 before you upload is usually a ten-to-one saving on its own.
Applied together on a video-led screen, these routinely halve a library. The retail example above drops from 280MB to about 215MB if the clips are re-encoded at 4 Mbps, with no visible change on the wall.
Where competitors beat us on this
We should say this plainly, because it is true and you will find out anyway.
Yodeck’s free plan includes unlimited storage on a single screen, permanently (checked September 2026). If you have one screen and a lot of video, that is a better deal than anything we sell, and you should take it. OptiSigns has a free tier for up to three screens, with their logo on screen, 1GB of storage and community-only support (checked September 2026). OptiSigns stops metering storage from its Standard tier upward (checked September 2026), because a monthly fee per screen absorbs the cost of a disk somewhere.
What the metered quota buys you is a cost line that goes flat. We charge 49€ once instead of 8€ a month per screen forever, the price Yodeck publishes for its Basic tier, checked September 2026. That subscription is 96€ a year that keeps arriving: 288€ by the end of year three and 480€ by the end of year five, against 49€ paid once. On a first screen the account has repaid itself in a little over six months, and the five-year gap is 431€ in your favour. Five screens bought in one order is 313€, the 49€ account plus four extra licences at 66€ each, a third off the 99€ list because licences that go through the same checkout as the account are discounted automatically, with no code to enter. The same five screens at 8€ a month is 480€ every year, so that network is level before month eight and by year five you have paid 313€ against 2,400€. Added later the licences are 99€ each, so the same five-screen network is 445€ at list.
A metered quota is the price of that one-time licence. When nothing recurs, the included resources have to be finite and stated up front rather than quietly absorbed into a monthly fee, and storage is the line where you feel the trade. We covered the wider comparison in free digital signage software and in digital signage cost per screen.
What happens when you run out
Uploads stop when you reach the quota. Nothing already scheduled breaks, and nothing disappears from your screens. You cannot add new media until you make room.
In order of what to try:
- Delete superseded campaigns. Sort the library by date and be ruthless about last spring’s promotion. This solves most cases outright.
- Re-encode your biggest videos using the settings above. Check the largest handful of files first, they will be most of your total.
- Replace stored media with live widgets where it makes sense. A DataSet-driven price table beats twelve exported price slides on storage and on maintenance.
- Move up a tier. 1GB to 5GB is the PRO account, which brings the display ceiling and proof-of-play with it.
- Ask us. If none of the above fits, email info@myeasycms.com or call +48 509 937 137 and describe what you are storing.
On that last point, be aware of what we are not telling you: there is no published price for extra storage on its own. We quote it case by case, because the answer depends on how much and for how long. If a fixed, published storage price is important to your procurement process, ask before you buy rather than after. The step-by-step detail is in storage quota and media uploads, and organising the library itself is covered in playlists and the media library.
The short version
Work out what your rotation weighs before you worry about the quota. Images are small, video is not, and 4K on a 1080p screen is five times the file for none of the benefit. An image-led screen fits into 1GB with an enormous margin. A video-led screen with a monthly refresh is where the 5GB on PRO starts to earn its keep.
Nothing fetched live costs you storage, and the same file shared across ten screens costs the same as across one. If you are genuinely unsure which side of the line you fall on, add up your last three months of content at the sizes in the first table. The answer usually takes five minutes.
Related reading: storage quota and media uploads, digital signage cost per screen.