ScreenCloud - Do you know when to use Channels and Playlists?

ScreenCloud gives you two key building blocks for signage content: Playlists and Channels. If you pick the wrong one early, your signage becomes hard to scale, hard to update, and inconsistent across screens.

A simple way to think about it:

• Playlists are where you organize content into a reusable set (in a defined order).
• Channels are where you schedule and publish content to screens (and keep it consistent).

ScreenCloud even runs a webinar specifically to help clarify when/how to use each - you can find it on Channels and Playlists: Best Practices

❌ The Pain

When content is added directly into Channels (e.g. individual product slides, individual pages, individual apps), it usually leads to:

• Duplicate content across multiple Channels
• Painful updates (you must fix the same thing in many places)
• Inconsistent messaging between locations / screen groups
• Fragile setups when ownership changes (“who maintains this Channel again?”)

✅ Best Practice

Use Playlists as your “unit of ownership”, and Channels as your “broadcast surface”

In ScreenCloud Channels, the media picker lets you add different content types – including Playlists, media, links, and apps – into a Channel.

That means you can structure things cleanly:

• Playlists: reusable building blocks (owned by a team or topic)
• Channels: where those building blocks are assembled + scheduled

To do that:

1. Create one Playlist per product (or topic / “content module”)
2. Add the product content to the Playlist (not the Channel)
3. Build Channels by combining Playlists
4. When a product changes, update the Playlist once and all Channels that use it will inherit the change

How to create a Playlist and Channel

✅ Figure: Good example - Creating a new Playlist

➕ Playlist

1. In ScreenCloud | left bar | Playlists | New Playlist
2. Standardize Playlist naming (so it's easier to understand later) e.g. 01-(ProductName) (04-SSW.Rules)
3. Add the content to your playlist e.g. Page Scroll, Dashboard, PowerBI
4. Publish

This will create a new playlist with your content.

✅ Figure: Good example - Creating a new Channel

➕ Channel

1. In ScreenCloud | left bar | Channels | New Channel
2. Add the Playlists you just created to your channel
3. Publish
4. Add/assign/embed the channel somewhere to start showing it to your audience