What to run digital signage on, and what to avoid

Sticks, boxes, commercial panels and old tablets — the trade-offs, and the three specs that actually matter.

Signage hardware advice is usually either "buy a commercial player" or "a Raspberry Pi will do". Both are sometimes right. Here is how to tell which.

The three specs that matter

Almost nothing on a spec sheet predicts whether a screen works. These three do:

Video decoding. Most signage stutter is a decoder problem, not a network one. A device that decodes H.264 1080p in hardware plays smoothly; the same device asked for H.265 or 4K falls over. Match your media to the hardware and a cheap stick is fine.

RAM. 2 GB is the floor for a board with video and a couple of live widgets. 1 GB devices survive a static image and start restarting under anything else.

Power behaviour. Does it switch on when mains power returns? Some sticks do, some sit in standby until somebody presses a button. This is the single most expensive spec to get wrong, because getting it wrong means a site visit after every power cut.

Nothing else — CPU model, storage class, benchmark scores — predicts as much.

The options

Android TV stick (cheap). The lowest-cost route. Behind any HDMI screen, around the price of two months of a typical per-screen subscription. Check the power behaviour and the RAM before buying fifty.

Android set-top box. More RAM, better thermals, ethernet on many. The sensible default for anything you will not want to touch again.

Commercial Android panel. The display runs Android itself, so the APK installs directly and there is no box, no extra cable and no separate power. If you are buying screens anyway, this is the tidiest answer.

Old tablet. Excellent for room doors and counter panels. Keep it on mains, accept that the battery will swell eventually, and do not use it anywhere it will be in the sun.

Raspberry Pi. Good hardware, and irrelevant if your software is an Android app — check what your chosen product actually runs on before buying the hardware.

Things that cost more than the device

The mount. Almost always more than a stick.
The cable route. Getting power and HDMI to where the screen goes is the real job.
The enclosure, if the device is reachable by the public.
Connectivity, if the location has none. A 4G router with its own SIM can cost more per month than the signage software.

That last one is worth checking before you choose software, because a product that does not need the connection removes the line entirely.

Thermals

Screens run for fourteen hours a day. A device in a sealed box behind a panel in a sunlit window will throttle and then restart, and it will look like a software fault for weeks.

Ventilate the enclosure. Do not mount the device against the back of a hot panel. If a device is warm to the touch on a cool day, it will fail in August.

A boring recommendation

For most sites: a mid-range Android box with 2 GB of RAM, ethernet if you can run it, on mains power, in a ventilated mount, playing 1080p H.264. Test one reboot and one power cut before rolling out. Buy one spare per ten screens — it costs less than one emergency call-out.

Our install guide covers the software side, and the hardening guide covers the failure modes worth rehearsing before you leave site.