Written for the person who has to run it. Every item below is shipping, and where something needs particular hardware or is off by default, the entry says so rather than hoping you find out later.
Most signage products hand you an upload box and let you find out on the wall that the file was wrong. Herald does the conversion work on the way in.
Drag files anywhere on the media page, or straight onto a playlist. Photos off an iPhone, video exported from whatever your team happens to use, a graphic someone saved in an odd format. Herald converts it into something the screens can play. Nobody has to know what a file format is.
Drop in a 4K video and Herald quietly prepares a version sized for your screens while you carry on with something else. It shows as processing until it is ready, and it will not go on a screen half-finished. You never have to think about what a screen can and cannot play.
Set in and out points on a video and only that section plays. Trim once at the media level and every use inherits it, or override the trim on a single playlist item when one screen needs a shorter cut.
Fit it, fill it, or drag the picture around on a preview until the right part of it is on screen. A tall photo on a wide TV stops being a guessing game about whose head gets cut off.
Upload something the library already has and Herald asks: use the existing copy, replace it in place so every screen using it updates at once, or keep both. Replacing in place is how you fix a typo on a slide that is already on six walls.
Put an expiry date on a slide when you upload it. When the date passes, the sweeper pulls it out of every playlist it is in. The Christmas Eve times graphic does not need a calendar reminder in January.
Design a template once with your fonts and colors, then anyone can fill in the words and get a slide that matches. Templates are also what Planning Center events render through.
This is the part most products get thin. Herald schedules on real recurrence rules, including the ones that move every year.
One loop can hold images, video, a web page, a layout with zones, and a live stream. Set a duration per item and a crossfade between them. Items advance without a flash of black because the player never tears down its output.
Every screen works from the same clock, not from whenever it happened to be switched on, so two displays either side of a doorway show the same thing at the same moment. A screen that joins late catches up to the right point in the video instead of starting it again from the top.
Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Every N days anchored to a start date. The third Sunday of the month. A single run with an end date. Extra one-off windows bolted onto an existing rule. Each schedule can carry its own extra windows without cloning the rule.
Schedule something for Good Friday or Ash Wednesday once and it lands correctly every year, without anyone editing dates each January. Herald knows the national holidays, the common observances, and the church calendar including Advent. Add your own dates, or tell a schedule to skip a set entirely.
A rotation moves through content on whatever rhythm you set: a new slide each day, a different one each week, or several through a single day. It works with anything, not just slides. Weeks that break the pattern are easy too, because you can skip a date or give a particular weekday its own slot.
A rotation about to run out of content tells you while there is still time to fix it, and it does that on its own switch so it is not competing with alerts about screens going dark.
A message along the bottom of the screen, over whatever else is playing. Schedule it like anything else, and take it down the same way.
Split a screen into zones and give each one its own content, with a preview-first editor so you see the arrangement before it reaches the wall.
The reason Herald exists. Overflow rooms, nursery screens, lobby feeds and the hallway TV that should show the service when the service is on.
Take it from the video switcher in your control room, from anywhere else on your network, or straight off the screen of the computer already running the service. Herald Relay is a small app that sits in the menu bar of a Mac in the booth and gets on with it.
Send the service to the overflow room, the nursery, the lobby and the hallway at the same time. Herald prepares the feed once and hands it to every screen that wants it, and it only does the work while somebody is actually watching.
Somebody turns off the TV in the overflow room, or a screen restarts. The picture everywhere else carries on without so much as a flicker, and the screen that left rejoins whenever it comes back.
A brief hiccup holds the last picture rather than flashing black at a room full of people. If the feed has genuinely stopped, the screen is back on its normal loop almost immediately, and it returns to live by itself once the feed comes back.
You choose what to send and where it goes, from anywhere. The pictures themselves travel straight across your own network and never go out to the internet, so there is nothing for anyone outside the building to reach.
A screen you cannot see is a screen you find out about from someone who is annoyed.
Ask any player for a frame and it uploads what is on the panel right now. The wall view puts every screen on one page you can leave running on a monitor in the booth.
Herald tells you when a screen goes offline, when a cable comes loose, when playback stops, and when a rotation is about to run out of content. It reaches you by email, in a Google Chat space, or as a notification on your phone.
email, Google Chat, or your phone
Herald keeps a running record of when each screen was up. So when somebody says the lobby screen was off all last Sunday, you can check rather than guess, and you get the times it happened.
A report of what actually played, when, and on which screen. Useful for a sponsor, and useful for arguing with someone who is certain their slide never ran.
Herald wakes the screens before the doors open and puts them to sleep at night, so nothing is left glowing in an empty hallway until Monday. It also keeps the TV's own input labelled Herald rather than something like HDMI 2, and puts the label back if the TV forgets it.
Put a screen on your Wi-Fi from the dashboard, without a ladder or a keyboard. The password is stored encrypted. A screen on a wired connection that loses its cable moves over to Wi-Fi and back again on its own, without ever dropping off.
If a screen misbehaves, you can look at what it is doing, restart it, or reboot it from the dashboard instead of walking across the building. If it still needs us, one click packages up everything we need to work out what went wrong.
Organize screens by group and by site, then scope a user to one campus. A volunteer at the north campus cannot change the screens downtown.
Every one of these exists because the failure it covers actually happened.
Everything a screen needs is already sitting on it. If the internet drops out, the loop carries on as though nothing happened, and the screen catches up by itself once it is back.
If a screen stops showing what it should, it does not just sit there. It works through fixing itself one step at a time, going no further than it has to, up to restarting itself completely. Herald records what it did, so a screen that recovered on its own during the service still leaves you something to read afterwards.
Screens update themselves, a few at a time rather than all at once, so a bad release cannot take the building down in one go. A screen that comes back unhappy puts itself straight back on the version that was working. Only releases we have signed will install at all.
One action takes every screen with a message you prepared in advance, and one action gives them back. It persists on the device, so a power cut during an emergency does not put the announcements loop back up when the power returns.
A player that has not been activated says so. A deactivated one says that instead of showing a boot logo forever. You do not have to guess from across the room whether a blank screen is broken or just unassigned.
We left a screen playing for three weeks without touching it once. That is the kind of test that turns up the faults which only appear in week two, which is exactly why we run it.
The best signage workflow is the one nobody has to be trained on.
Point Herald at a Drive folder and the two stay in step, both ways. A subfolder becomes a library. Drop a video in from your phone on the way to church and it is in Herald a minute later. Tidy the folder up and the library follows. You always keep your own copy of everything, so there is nothing to export if you ever leave.
Herald reads your PCO calendar and renders each upcoming event through a slide template. Edit the event in Planning Center and the slide is redrawn. The slide expires when the event ends and drops out of the playlist by itself. Enter it once, in the place your team already enters it.
Put a live web page on a screen: a giving total, an attendance board, next week's roster. Pages that sit behind a login work too, and no password ever lives on the screen itself. Herald waits for the page to finish drawing, so charts arrive complete rather than half loaded.
A countdown to the next service on the lobby screens, from your weekly schedule. It counts in minutes on purpose. The second-by-second clock belongs on the stage display, not on the wall where people are still finding their seats.
Anything you can do in the dashboard can be done from your own scripts, so the thing you repeat every week can be handled for you. Ask us if you want a hand wiring something up.
The failure mode here is either one exhausted person doing all the posting, or a shared login nobody can audit.
A single-purpose page a volunteer opens on their phone. They type the announcement and it lands only on the playlists you marked as open to volunteers. They never see the dashboard, and they cannot reach the screens you did not open.
Viewer, operator and admin, scoped to a site if you run more than one. A viewer can watch the wall view without being able to change what is on it.
Who changed what, and when, with a name against it. Scoped per workspace and readable in the dashboard rather than buried in a server log.
Password with a proper reset flow, or Google sign-in restricted to your Workspace domain so leavers lose access when their account is disabled.
Add the dashboard to your phone's home screen and it opens like an app. It still opens in the dead spot behind the stage, rather than showing you a browser error.
Everything is backed up every night, encrypted, into your own Google Drive, media included. We have rehearsed restoring from those backups start to finish, which is the only thing that makes a backup worth having.
The free plan runs two screens for as long as you want, with none of this held back. Start there and find out on your own hardware.
