When the internet drops, an easyCMS screen keeps playing. It does not stream from us: it downloads its designs, photos and videos in advance and plays them from its own storage. What it cannot do is fetch anything new, so live pages stop and anything with changing data goes stale.
This applies to every player we support: Android, Windows, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen.
Keeps playing, stops, goes stale
Keeps playing
Your Studio designs, photos, videos and playlists, already stored on the player. The schedule carries on too: breakfast at 07:00, the weekend offer on Saturday.
Stops
Anything fetched at the moment it plays: a web page, a live dashboard, a video stream, a social feed. It shows an empty box.
Goes stale
Weather, news headlines, exchange rates and price changes. The screen keeps the last version it received, and nothing on it looks broken.
The stale kind is the one to watch. A weather panel still showing yesterday’s forecast looks perfectly healthy, so nobody reports it. List every part of your screens that depends on live data: that is your exposure.
What you see in Studio
On My screens, the screen’s badge turns to Offline, with when it was last seen. Anything you change meanwhile, a new price, a design sent with Play on…, an Urgent notice, waits for the screen and is not lost. The screen card says so: “Changed 2 minutes ago, but the screen has not played it yet.”
When the connection comes back, the screen collects everything it missed. Wait for “Has all its content” before deciding something is wrong.
How long a screen can manage alone
Once, at the start
A new player needs internet to be added to your account and download its first content. Before that, it has nothing to play.
About two days ahead
Players fetch roughly the next two days of schedule. Beyond that they keep playing what they have, but anything starting later has not arrived.
A licence check every 30 days
Android and LG webOS players re-check their licence about monthly. Without it they keep playing but stop downloading new content.
For a café whose Wi-Fi drops now and then, none of this matters. For a site with no internet at all, such as a boat or a remote plant, a phone hotspot once a month is enough; talk to us before you buy player hardware.
Build screens that fail gracefully
- Keep one design that always works in every rotation: a photo or video that says something useful about your business.
- Never give a live page the whole screen. A blank corner reads as a design choice; a blank screen reads as a fault.
- Test by pulling the cable before installation, and watch a full loop twice. Ten minutes finds every dead area.
Checklist for weak Wi-Fi
Most “the signage is unreliable” complaints are really network complaints.
- Use a cable wherever you can. If an electrician is already fitting a socket behind the screen, a network point costs little more.
- Never use the guest network. Its “accept” page expects a person to click; a player will not.
- Check the signal where the player sits, behind the mounted screen. Metal brackets often cost two bars.
- Ask for a fixed address for each player, so it is easy to find and to allow through a firewall.
- Restart overnight with a timer socket if the device has no schedule of its own. It clears slow faults before anyone sees them.
- Ask us to switch on offline alerts, so you hear it from us, not from a customer. See display monitoring.
When a screen goes dark
- Look at it. Black, frozen, “no signal” or the wrong content are four different faults. Wrong content is scheduling, not the network.
- Check power and the input. After a cleaning shift or a power cut, this is the answer more often than anything else.
- Open My screens. Online means the player is fine and the fault is the screen or the cable. Offline means the site’s network or power.
- Tap Take a new picture on its Details page. If a picture comes back, nobody needs to travel.
Then work through troubleshooting offline displays or our common digital signage faults.
Planning a site with poor or no internet? Email info@myeasycms.com or call +48 509 937 137 with your conditions, and we will tell you straight whether the plan holds.