Table of Contents
What's an advanced schedule?
You already use a lot of tools to schedule your work in advance. You plan events and marketing campaigns months ahead of time so you can thoughtfully put all the details in place. Digital signage is one of those important details—scheduling your content playlists to start and stop at specific times will ensure that your audience is getting the information they need exactly when it’s relevant to them. No earlier and no later.
Consistently relevant content goes a long way toward ensuring that your audience will interact with it. If they know the sales you list are actually current, they’re more likely to shop according to your marketing direction.
If viewers are confident that the schedule of events you’re displaying is for this weekend and not last month, you’re probably going to attract more attendees. If your audience is aware of changes or disruptions to service well ahead of time, they can plan around them accordingly and keep their days operating smoothly.
How to create & schedule a playlist
1. Log in to your Fugo account. If you haven't registered a Fugo account yet, you can head over to fugo.ai/app to start your 14-day free trial.
2. Navigate to the Playlist page in the top navigation bar.
3. Click either of the Create Playlist buttons.
4. This will open the playlist builder.
You can add screens, content, or scheduling in any order. For the purpose of this guide, we'll go sequentially down the page, starting with naming your playlist & adding a screen.
Name your playlist & add your screen/s
5. Start by giving your playlist a name in the top left corner of the page. We recommend using a name that's relevant & clear to make it easier to find in case you have multiple playlists.
I'll name mine "October Notices" because it will house a slideshow of announcements for my company that will be relevant for the month of October.
5. Click Select Screens and choose the screen, screens, or screen group where you want this playlist to show.
If you have hyper local content that's relevant for only a small part of your network (E.g. your warehouse screens, then just select those.)
If you have content that's more broadly relevant to your entire network, you can choose All Screens.
I've just got one screen set up in my demo account, so I'll choose that one.
Note:
You can also publish a playlist to a Channel - that's a virtual screen that runs your Fugo content inside a browser or embeddable iFrame (which you can put into your intranet or other tools). 👉 Learn more about Channel set up here
If you haven't paired a screen to your account, click Create Screen in the popup and follow our instructions for pairing a screen.
6. Your selected screen/s will be listed on the Screens card now:
Add your content
7. Select content to add to your playlist by clicking Select Content.
8. This will open the content picker, where you can choose between:
Apps
Display a feed from one of Fugo's third party app integrations like Power BI, Looker, Google Slides, Canto, Dropbox & more.
Media
Display an image, video, audio, or presentation file you've uploaded to your media library.
Studio Content
Display a slide or slideshow you've created in the Design Studio.
Dashboards
Display a dashboard you've connected and saved to your Dashboard library via the TV Dashboards feature.
🤚 Hint! Use the search bar to find your content faster.
I'm going to select my Octoboer slideshow of custom slides I created in the Design Studio from the Studio Content tab:
Psst! Here's what it looked like to build this playlist in the studio:
9. Click Add Items when you’ve finished choosing your content. It will now be listed on the Content card.
10. If you want to add more content to this playlist, click Add More Content and choose more items (such as an app, media, or dashboard.)
💁 Note: if you see an orange gear notification next to an item in your playlist, that means you need to configure the item's settings before publishing your playlist. That may mean configuring your media or app settings.
For example, I need to configure my BBC app settings:
11. If you want to change the duration of this item in your playlist - that is, how long this item runs inside your playlist - you can do so in the Duration field.
Note that you can not change Design Studio content durations from the playlist builder - you'll need to do that in the studio (because you may have multiple slides with multiple elements of differing durations.)
Add your start & stop schedule
12. Once your screen/s and content have been added, the playlist is ready to run. If you don't want to assign it any specific timing, you can hit Publish at the bottom of the builder.
Without any scheduling assigned, it will play indefinitely until you unpublish it.
13. If you want to get specific about when your playlist runs, then you can use the scheduling tools available on the Schedule card:
Date range
This allows you to set a start & end date for your playlist.
Untick the No End Date box to open the calendar so you can input your start & end dates.
Because my playlist is for the month of October, I'll set it to run between October 1st - November 1st.
🙋 Note on expiration dates: Playlists expire at 00:00 on the selected expiration date. This means the playlist will not play at all on that date.
So in my example playlist - if I set the expiration date to November 1, the playlist will stop at midnight as November 1 begins, thus ensuring it plays through the full month of October.
To have your content run through a specific day in full, set the expiration date to the day after the last day you want it to appear.
Week schedule
Use this to assign your playlist to run on certain days & times. Click the Week Schedule box to open the week scheduler.
You can click & drag along the scheduler:
Select entire days:
Even add specific time blocks down to the minute:
Preview, save & publish your playlist
With all your inputs ready, your playlist is almost done! You can:
Click Preview to run through your playlist:
Click Finish later to save your playlist & come back to it.
Click Publish to push it to your screen/s. If your playlist is not set to start until a later date, it will start on that date (you won't see your screen content update until then.)
14. Your new playlist will now be listed as a card on your Playlists page.
We cover the controls on that page in this guide.
Need more help?
Our Playlists 101 guide covers playlist creation and management in depth. If you're new to Fugo, it's a great place to start learning about content management.
If you’d like to see a demo of Fugo’s capabilities, you can book one with us any time.
Or if you have more specific questions, reach out to our support team at support@fugo.ai, or via the chat in Fugo’s CMS.