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5 Steps to Set Up Your First Digital Screen
Setting up your first digital signage screen sounds harder than it is. With Showcel you can have a screen showing live content in under ten minutes — no specialised hardware, no consultant, no IT ticket. This guide walks you through the five steps that get you from zero to a screen running in your space.
1. Pick the right hardware for your screen
Almost any device that opens a web page can run a digital signage screen. The cheapest entry point is an Amazon Fire TV Stick — around €40, plugs into any HDMI port. Other options include Chromecast, Raspberry Pi, an Android TV, or the built-in browser of a commercial display. There is no proprietary box you have to buy.
Pick what you already own if you can. The hardware does almost no work — Showcel runs in the browser, the heavy lifting happens on our servers.
2. Create a free Showcel account
Head to the registration page and sign up with an email address. No credit card, and you get a full 30-day trial of every feature. Confirm the email and you land on the dashboard.
3. Add your screen and pair the device
Inside the dashboard, click Add screen. Showcel gives you a six-character pairing code. Open the player URL on your TV device, enter the code, and the screen shows up in the dashboard a few seconds later.
That is the entire setup on the device side. From now on, everything you do happens in the browser on your laptop or phone.
4. Build your first piece of content
Open the canvas editor and drag elements onto a 1920×1080 canvas: an image, a text block, a weather widget, a clock. The editor uses real units in pixels, so what you design is exactly what shows on screen.
If you run a restaurant, jump straight to a digital menu board layout template. Retail and reception screens have their own starting points too.
5. Push it live
Click Publish and the screen updates within seconds. There is no separate deploy step, no waiting period. Edit the menu, save — every screen running that menu refreshes immediately.
If your internet drops, the screen keeps showing the last version it loaded. As soon as the connection is back, it picks up your latest changes automatically.
What to do next
Once the first screen is live, the natural next steps are: schedule different content for different times of day, add a second zone (e.g. a sidebar with weather), or group multiple screens to push the same content everywhere at once. All of that lives one click away inside the dashboard you already know.