💁 About this article
This article is part of Fugo’s Power BI knowledge base: a collection of resources answering common Power BI questions. We include notes throughout where Fugo’s integration may be helpful for displaying dashboards on digital signage.
Table of contents
Short answer
Not securely, not interactively, and not at scale.
If a user opens a Power BI report in the Power BI Service, they need a license unless the content sits in Premium / Fabric capacity.
Why viewers need licenses
Power BI is priced around consumption, not creation.
Viewing a report isn’t passive from Microsoft’s perspective:
Queries run
Data refreshes
Permissions are enforced
Infrastructure is consumed
That’s why viewers are licensed too.
The exceptions people stumble into
Publish to web: Free, but public and insecure.
Free trials: Often mistaken for permanent access.
Shared PBIX files: Technically works, operationally painful.
None of these solve ongoing access cleanly.
Power BI in PowerPoint: why it feels like a loophole
Embedding a report in PowerPoint often feels like sharing without licenses.
In reality:
The report still belongs to Power BI
The presenter’s license is doing the work
Viewers aren’t interacting directly with Power BI
This distinction matters and explains why it works in meetings but not as a general distribution strategy.
TV screens are different from users
Power BI licensing assumes:
One user → one browser → one report
Shared screens break that assumption.
A TV showing KPIs:
Has no mouse or keyboard
Doesn’t need interactivity
Isn’t tied to an individual user
It’s a display endpoint, not a viewer.
Digital signage as a consumption model
Digital signage platforms like Fugo treat the screen as the consumer.
They:
Authenticate once to Power BI
Respect existing permissions
Render dashboards for passive viewing
Keep content running unattended
This doesn’t remove licensing requirements but it removes the need to license every person who walks past the screen.
Takeaway
If you’re trying to avoid Pro licenses for hundreds of casual viewers, the solution isn’t a loophole - it’s changing how the data is consumed.