Digital signage driven by the same program data as everything else — so a session that moves on the agenda grid moves on the wall. The deepest module in the catalog, and the one whose settings do not live on the Products tab at all.
What it is
A managed fleet of screens rather than a slideshow. You design a template, create instances of it for particular rooms, and point any browser-capable screen at each instance's own web address. The screens report in, tell you when one has gone dark, and can be reloaded remotely.
What it changes
Printed room cards stop being wrong the moment anything moves. A session marked as running late shows as running late on the door without anyone editing the program. And when a screen dies at 7am on day two, you find out from an email rather than from a delegate.
The seven display types
| Type | What it shows | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| Room | Today's agenda for one room as a session list, with the active session highlighted and past sessions optionally hidden. | A room |
| Airport | A departure-board grid across every room — now and next per room, auto-paging. | Nothing |
| Zone | The same now-and-next grid, scoped to one track's rooms. | A track |
| Speaker Spotlight | "Now presenting" for one room — photo, name, credentials, company, bio, session, and an up-next strip. | A room |
| Welcome Splash | Lobby branding, a custom welcome message and the event dates. Uses no agenda data at all. | Nothing |
| Wayfinding | Large directional arrows with destination labels, in eight directions. | Nothing |
| Poster Session | Board listings grouped by track or location, with a QR to the live poster gallery. | Posters |
Each type ships with a preset — a polished starting point with its own palette that stays fully editable. Beyond the type, a template is a stack of blocks you reorder, hide or remove: a header, the type's own content block, plus any of a sponsor banner, a scrolling ticker, a slideshow, a floating QR code and a live session-status panel. The header and the content block are structural and can be hidden but not deleted.
What you can do
- Design templates at organization level and reuse them across every event, or scope one to a single event and promote it later.
- Reorder blocks, control which session fields appear and where, and style each field individually.
- Brand with logos, background images, Google Fonts and a full color set, with a contrast warning when text would be hard to read.
- Create instances in bulk, up to fifty at a time, with names generated from the rooms.
- Override per screen — different wayfinding directions, a different slideshow, a different background — without touching the template.
- Pair a screen with a six-character code shown on the screen itself, so a technician needs no account.
- Let screens name themselves, and see the whole fleet with last-seen times.
- Reload any screen remotely.
- Push announcements at three severities, targeted by screen, by display type or by schedule.
- Keep a version history of every template, with revert.
- Run dayparting schedules so one screen changes role through the day.
Settings
Beacon's product entry carries no settings of its own — everything is on the Beacon tab. These are the ones with real operational consequence.
| Setting | What it controls | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Screen-went-dark alerts | Email everyone holding signage permission when a screen stops checking in. | Off |
| Alert after | Minutes offline before that counts as dark. Two minutes to twelve hours. | 10 minutes |
| Auto-refresh interval | How often a screen pulls fresh program data. | 30 seconds |
| Paging interval | How long each page of a grid holds before advancing. | 10 seconds |
| Hide past sessions | Drop finished sessions off a room list. | On |
| Highlight active | Accent the session running now. | On |
| Show presentations | Nest individual talks under their session. | On |
| Transition style | None, fade or slide, for paging, slideshows and spotlight changes. Respects reduced-motion preferences. | None |
| Kiosk mode | Let people tap the screen to browse the full agenda and scan a QR to continue on their phone. | Off |
| Kiosk timeout | Seconds of inactivity before it returns to the sign. | 90 seconds |
| Sponsor placement | Header, footer, sidebar or interstitial, with rotation interval and tier filter. | Rotates every 8–10s |
Two session settings that change what screens show
Running late — set a delay in minutes on a session and screens shift every live calculation by it, flagging the session as running late without altering the program. Visible — clear it and the session disappears from signage entirely, including from the kiosk agenda.
Screens report every 60 seconds and a sweep runs every five minutes, alerting when the last report is older than your threshold. With the default ten-minute threshold, a screen that dies is reported in ten to fifteen minutes — not instantly. One email per outage; alerts re-arm when the screen returns.
Announcements come in three severities. Info and warning appear as a banner over the normal display and cycle if there are several. Emergency covers the entire screen until you deactivate it — nothing else is visible. Screens pick announcements up within about ten seconds.
Sessions assigned to rooms, for every type except Welcome and Wayfinding. A screen with no sessions renders correctly and shows nothing.
Screen identity is per browser tab, so one computer driving three windows counts as three screens, and a browser restart creates a new screen record. Anyone who knows a screen's identifier can rename it — deliberate, so kiosks can name themselves, but worth knowing. Dayparting windows repeat daily and cannot vary by day of week.