Carousel Basics with Sophie

Hi, I'm Sophie. I'm part of the Carousel sales team. I would like to take you on a quick tour of our digital signage software.

First we need to talk about how we organize things in Carousel. We call the entire screen a channel. Each channel can be divided into zones. Each zone has a list of bulletins that play in a loop. Media players are connected to your screens and tune into a channel.

This organization is very important to us. We have spent the past 20 years making digital signage software using the guiding principle that it must be easy for everyone to use, not just graphic designers. We believe that the more people who can create messages the more successful your digital signage will be.

First, I'm going to log into Carousel from my computer or mobile device. Each user has their own permissions to zones and other settings so we can collaborate and have control over what gets on the screen.

Now that I'm in, let's create a message! I simply click on 'New Bulletin' then pick a template. We use templates so we can simplify the creation of bulletins and control how those bulletins look. Most of the time these templates are already created for me and, if I have permissions, I can make them too.

All I need to do is type out my message and away we go! Next I schedule when this bulletin goes onto the screen. A unique thing with Carousel is that each bulletin gets its own schedule. This allows us to build a dynamic presentation that is always up to date. The worst thing for digital signage is to have old, stale messages!

That's it! The bulletin will played on the screens that are tuned to that channel. If I have limited permissions, my bulletin will be held until an administrator approves it. 

We try to keep things straight-forward by not using technical mumbo jumbo words like media assets, playlists, and endpoints. However, this does not mean that Carousel is a lightweight. We have one of the richest feature sets of any digital signage software on the market.

An example of this depth is our emergency notification workflow. Using the same bulletin creation steps that we just went through, I can override the content of any, or all, of the screens in just a few clicks. We can even give some of our staff limited access to create only emergency messages. Even more, Carousel can integrate with various alert system to trigger bulletins automatically.

Speaking of automatic, we feel like the best digital signage system is one that updates itself. Carousel can pull in data from all sorts of different places like calendar systems, RSS feeds, weather and social media accounts so you don't have to retype any information. Also, you can easily upload things that you already have created like images and videos.

Now that I've created some bulletins let's go see what's on the screen. In 'Manage Bulletins' I can see what is currently playing in this zone, what is scheduled to play in the future and what needs approval. A super cool thing about Carousel is that zones can actually be shared on multiple channels creating less work and more consistency across all your screens.

If you want to change the channel on a screen you can do that through our player dashboard. You can even schedule channel changes and control when the screens power on and off. Pretty slick!

Thanks for watching! I look forward to talking with you about your unique digital signage needs.