The five lines in a screen budget
Every network has the same five lines: the panel, the player, the installation, the connection and the software. Four of them are one-off and one is monthly, which is why a spreadsheet that only counts the first year gets the decision wrong in both directions.
The panel
A consumer TV starts at a couple of hundred dollars and will run a few hours a day for a few years. A commercial panel costs two to three times more and is built for long duty cycles, higher brightness and portrait mounting.
The rule that holds up in practice: use a consumer TV where the screen runs under eight hours a day, away from direct light, and where a failure is an inconvenience. Use a commercial panel above a counter, in a window, in portrait, or anywhere a dark screen costs sales.
A window screen is a category of its own. Daylight needs a high brightness panel, and the price reflects it.
The player
This is where a vendor choice moves the number most.
- A browser inside the TV costs nothing extra, because you already bought it
- An Android stick or box is usually between 50 and 150 dollars per screen
- A Chrome device is usually between 150 and 350 dollars, and manages itself
- A Windows mini PC is usually between 250 and 600 dollars, and fits existing IT management
- A vendor locked player is priced by that vendor, and so is its replacement
A player that is a browser page removes this from the negotiation entirely: you buy whatever is cheapest that runs reliably.
Installation and mounting
The line nobody budgets. A bracket, a cable run, a socket behind the panel and an electrician for an afternoon is often 150 to 500 dollars per screen, and more if the wall is awkward or the ceiling is high. Portrait mounting and recessed panels cost more again.
Get this quoted per location before the rollout, not after, because it varies far more than the hardware does.
The connection
Most sites already have a connection and one more device on it is not noticeable. Where a screen sits somewhere without coverage, the options are a cable run, a mesh access point or a mobile data device with its own monthly cost. The mobile route is the one that quietly adds a recurring line to a budget that was supposed to be one-off.
The software
Priced per screen per month in this category. Displayer is 19 USD per active screen monthly on Essential, 29 USD on Professional, 49 USD on Network, with a lower rate on the yearly term. Team members are not charged. The pricing page has the whole table.
The market ranges roughly from 10 to 30 dollars per screen monthly for hosted platforms, with enterprise offerings quoted rather than published.
What self hosting actually costs
Open source signage has no licence fee, and it is a real option for a technical team with one site. Across several sites the cost reappears, in places a spreadsheet does not have a column for.
- A server to host it, patched, backed up and monitored
- Storage for media, and bandwidth to distribute it
- A small computer per screen, plus the image on it to maintain
- Certificates, remote access and firewall rules for every location
- The person who knows how it works, and what happens when they leave
Two or three days of staff time a month across a 40 screen network is the whole software bill of a hosted platform, before anything breaks.
A worked example: 10 screens in 4 locations
| Line | Assumption | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Panels | 10 commercial panels at 700 USD | 7 000 USD one-off |
| Players | 10 Android boxes at 120 USD | 1 200 USD one-off |
| Mounting and power | 10 installs at 300 USD | 3 000 USD one-off |
| Connection | Existing lines at each site | No extra cost |
| Software | Professional, yearly rate, 23 USD per screen monthly | 2 760 USD per year |
| Content time | Half a day a week of someone's time | Your own number |
First year, roughly 14 000 USD plus the content time. Second year, 2 760 USD plus content time. That shape is the point: the network is front loaded, and the recurring part is small compared with what one wrong promotion across four locations costs.
What makes the number worse later
- Screens that fail early because a consumer TV was used in a 14 hour location
- A vendor locked player that has to be replaced with the same vendor's player
- Site visits, because nobody can see what a screen is doing from the panel
- Content made as flat pictures, which needs a designer for every price change
- A dead screen that nobody notices for weeks, which is the whole spend on that location wasted
The last one is the largest and the least visible. A screen network with no proof of play is paying for walls it cannot see.
The number worth calculating
Take what you spend on one campaign, divide by the number of locations, and that is the value at risk in each place. Multiply by the number of locations you cannot currently verify. In most networks that figure is larger than the entire software bill, which is why verification, not price per screen, is the part worth getting right.