A New Display Is Not Showing Up or Says It Is Awaiting Approval
Two unrelated faults arrive as one complaint. Tell them apart, claim a screen that is waiting at Add a display, or fix a player that never reached easyCMS.
Tip Read what the screen itself says before you change anything. Two unrelated faults arrive as the same complaint, and the screen tells you which one you have. A screen reporting that it is awaiting authorisation reached easyCMS and registered correctly, it is only waiting to be claimed. A screen showing nothing, or reporting that it cannot register or reach the CMS, never got that far, and the cause is the address, the key or the network. If the screen worked before and has only now stopped, you want Display Shows as Offline instead.
If this is what your screen says, the player is fine. It just has not been claimed yet.
The screen says it is awaiting authorisation
The wording varies, usually Display is Registered and awaiting Authorisation from an Administrator in the CMS, on older players Display is awaiting licensing approval from an Administrator. Ignore the word administrator, you do not need one. Nothing is broken, the player has found us and stopped on purpose, and until it is claimed it is inert: no licence held, nothing downloaded, nothing on screen. Leave it powered on.
- On a phone or laptop using the same internet connection as the screen, open Add a display. That is a hard requirement, we match your browser’s public address against the player’s.
- Sign in with your easyCMS login, which lasts thirty minutes.
- Find your screen. The page lists unclaimed screens on your connection that have checked in within the last ten minutes, at most ten of them.
- Type a name, which is required, then click Connect.
The screen starts playing at the next check-in. That is the whole route, you never open the CMS’s own authorisation screen. Where several screens are listed, each row shows the last four characters of its Display ID, to match against the player’s own status window.
Your screen is waiting to be claimed. Open this from a device on the same internet connection as it.
The list is empty and everything looks right
Three causes, likeliest first.
You are on a different connection from the screen. Your phone is on mobile data, or a guest network kept apart from the main one, while the screen is on the venue network. Join the screen’s own network and reload.
The screen has not checked in for more than ten minutes. Restart the player, give it a moment to check in, then reload. That display is no longer available to claim. means it dropped out of that window while the page sat open, or the screen is already claimed.
Self-enrolment is switched off. Display self-enrolment is not enabled. means it is switched off at our end, not something on your login. Tell us and we will look at it.
The screen never registered at all
If the player reports that it cannot register or cannot reach the CMS, or never appears at all, it made no contact. Check three things on the device.
- The CMS address, character by character. In full including
https://, normally https://app.myeasycms.com, no typo and no trailing space. A space pasted in from an email is invisible and fatal. - The CMS key. Exactly the value from your welcome email, the only place it exists, easyCMS logins are not administrator accounts and cannot open the CMS configuration. If that email has gone, ask us rather than guessing. A wrong key is the classic “installed fine, never appeared” cause.
- That the device is genuinely online. Load https://app.myeasycms.com in the device’s own browser. You should get the easyCMS login page with a valid padlock. If that fails the problem is the network, and nothing in the player will fix it.
On Windows both values live in the separate Player Options application rather than in the player itself.
Certificates and the device clock
A device whose date and time are wrong cannot complete an HTTPS connection, because a perfectly valid certificate looks invalid to it. It never looks like a clock problem, only a vague connection failure. Set the date, time and time zone, ideally from a time server, then restart the player. Newly unboxed and long-unplugged devices are the usual offenders. A deep-inspection proxy fails the same way, see Network Requirements and Firewall Rules.
If you have more screens than licences
Claiming a screen authorises it and uses one of your display slots. One screen, one licence, and we check accounts against what has been paid for. Where an allowance has been configured you may see Your plan covers N displays and all of them are in use. Add a licence to connect another screen. Read nothing into its absence, the rule is the same either way.
Buy another lifetime licence and we add it to your account by hand, within one business day and usually much sooner, then reload Add a display and connect the same screen.
Watch out To free a licence from a retired screen, deauthorise that display. Never delete it: deleting is permanent and releases nothing. Deleting is irreversible, throws away the name, schedule and history, and does not release the commercial player licence an Android or LG webOS screen carries. We hold those centrally, so tell us when a screen is retired.
Still stuck? Send us a support request with a photo of the player’s status window and we will connect it from our side.
Related articles: Adding a New Display to Your Account, Display Shows as Offline, Connecting Your First Display, Display Licences and Authorisation