Core concepts
Xignage is a digital signage platform: it lets you design content, organise it into playlists, decide when and where it plays, and push it to a network of display screens. This page explains the building blocks you'll meet throughout the rest of the docs.
Screens
A screen is a registered display device — a TV, monitor, or player box running the Xignage player app. Each screen connects to the platform, reports its status, and downloads the content configuration you publish to it. Screens can be grouped, assigned to sites, and controlled remotely (restart, wake, screenshot, and more).
Media
Media is the raw image and video footage stored in your media library. Anything you want to show on a screen starts life here. Media is organised into folders, tagged for search, and referenced by playlists and creatives.
Creatives
A creative is a designed piece of content built in the Creative Builder — a canvas-based editor where you combine images, video, text, and shapes into layered, animated compositions. Creatives are published as self-contained HTML packages that screens can play. A template is a reusable starting point for building creatives.
Playlists
A playlist is an ordered sequence of media items and creatives. Playlists are what you assign to screens (or to zones within a layout). You can reorder items, set per-item durations, and organise playlists into folders.
Layouts and zones
A layout divides a single screen into one or more regions called zones. Each zone can display its own playlist or creative, so a single screen can show several things at once — for example, a video zone beside a menu board.
Schedules
A schedule controls when a playlist or content item is active on a screen. Schedules can target dates, times, days of the week, and recurrence patterns, and they're timezone-aware so a national deployment can run on local time at each site.
Publishing
Changes you make in the CMS don't reach screens until you publish them. This draft/publish model lets you prepare and review edits safely — the player keeps showing the last published configuration until you push the new one. An optional publish request approval step lets creators submit changes for an approver to accept or reject before they go live.
Multiscreen displays
A multiscreen display treats several physical screens as one large virtual canvas. One screen acts as the primary and drives playback timing; the others render their slice of the canvas in sync — ideal for video walls.
Organisation: tenants, teams, and sites
Xignage is organised into a hierarchy:
- Tenant — a white-label reseller or partner organisation.
- Team — a company or organisation within a tenant; the primary unit of content ownership.
- Site — a physical location within a team, with its own timezone and access control.
- User — a member of a team, assigned a role that governs what they can do.
See the Organisation guides and the Roles & permissions reference for detail.
Add-ons
Add-ons are optional modules that extend the platform — for example, Fixgen (live sports fixtures), Google Sheets (dynamic data in creatives), Proof of Play (playback reporting), and Screen Sync (synchronised playback across screens). They're enabled at the team level with optional per-site overrides.