Broadsign Control Live

With Broadsign Control Live, you can:

• Push on-demand player polling: Immediately push content or configuration changes, fix campaign mistakes, or perform emergency take-down without having to wait for the player to poll. See On-Demand Player Polling.
• Player Monitoring Centre: Capture what your screens are displaying in real-time. Verify that updates or dynamic content render properly. See Player Monitoring Center
• Screenshots in the Service Panel: Access all screenshots taken from a particular player, and troubleshoot from within the Service Panel. See The Screenshots Tab in the Service Panel.
• Cloud Sync: When network security policies prevent direct connection between players, this option allows for content synchronization across the bidirectional channel. See Cloud Sync.

Note: If you are using Broadsign Control Live, you must open a TCP connection on port 443. See Network Access Rules.

Prerequisites

Broadsign Control Live is a feature that requires an understanding of a few other Broadsign resources.

• Quick Start Tutorial
• Home Ribbon
• View Bar Options
• Players (Resource)
• Configurations
• Configuration Profiles - Players

Broadsign Control Live is a premium service. Broadsign must activate it on your domain so that you can enable it. If you have yet to do so, contact Broadsign Sales.

Once Broadsign Control Live is available on your domain, you need to enable it.

Note: It is insufficient to enable this feature in a configuration profile. You must also associate it with a live player, an active display unit, and programmed content. For a brief tutorial, see Quick Start Tutorial.

Note: If you are using Broadsign Control Live, you must open a TCP connection on port 443. See Network Access Rules.

Broadsign understands that sometimes you want to effect immediate changes to a player, campaign or content. Waiting for the player to poll Broadsign Server is quick, but not fast enough. By enabling Broadsign Control Live, you can force your players to poll right away.

The following video describes how to use on-demand player polling.

There are two locations that provide access to on-demand player polling: the Home ribbon and the player contextual menu.

Use the Home ribbon:

1. From among the ribbons in Broadsign Control Administrator, select Home.

   

2. In the Live Add-On section, click Poll Now.

   Note: If you have yet to enable Broadsign Control Live on your domain, this icon will appear greyed-out.

   If successful, you will receive confirmation from within the Broadsign Control Administrator interface.

To use the player contextual menu:

1. From among the resource tabs on the left, select Players. See Resource Tabs.

2. Select the player, or player folder, for which you want to push a poll to Broadsign Server.

3. Right-click on the player or player folder. The player contextual menu appears:

   

4. Select Poll Now.

   Note: If you have yet to enable Broadsign Control Live on your domain, this option will appear greyed-out.

   If successful, you will receive confirmation from within the Broadsign Control Administrator interface.

With Broadsign Control Live activated on your domain, you can access screenshots in the Service Panel. See The Screenshots Tab.

Note: You can only access this feature if you have enabled Broadsign Control Live on your domain. For more information, contact your Sales representative or Broadsign Services.

This video describes how to use the Screenshots tab to troubleshoot your network with Broadsign Control Live.

If you have enabled Broadsign Control Live, the Screenshots tab of the Service Panel provides screenshots of what was recently displayed on your screens. You can set the interval between screenshots in The Live Tab (default is 600 s).

• Date – Select the date for which you want to see screenshots.
  • Scrub through the 24-hours of the date you select to scan through the day's screenshots.
  • Use the arrows on the left to move back and forth between consecutive screenshots.

  Note: Broadsign Control Live stores screenshots for up to a month, so you can select a date up to a month in the past.

• New screenshot – Enables you to immediately take a manual screenshot.
  • Burst – Take multiple screenshots in rapid succession.
  • Single – Take a single screenshot.

Broadsign understands how important it is to know what is appearing on your screens, in real-time. You can verify that dynamic content appears as it should and that changes appear promptly.

This video describes how to use the Broadsign Control Live Player Monitoring Center:

To access the Player Monitoring Center:

Note: If you have yet to enable Broadsign Control Live on your domain, this option will appear greyed-out.

1. From among the resource tabs on the left, select Players. See Resource Tabs.

2. From among the icons in the View Bar (see View Bar), select the Player Monitoring icon. The Player Monitoring Center appears in the work area.

   Note: All players on your domain that are live, and that have Broadsign Control Live enabled, will appear in the work area.

   • If the player (or player folder) is associated with a configuration profile that has Broadsign Control Live enabled, you will see something like the following:

   • If the player (or player folder) is not yet associated with a configuration profile that has Broadsign Control Live enabled, you will see the following:

     

3. Click the Play icon.

   • As of the moment you click Play, Broadsign Control takes screenshots of all associated screens. The intervals between screenshots, and the scale of the images, are those you set in your configuration profile. See Enable Broadsign Control Live.
   • Broadsign Control continues to take and store screenshots until you click Pause.
4. To scroll through the screenshots of a particular screen, hold the cursor over the image and swipe.

When network security policies prevent direct connection between players, this option allows for content synchronization across the bidirectional channel. In other words, you can both send and receive synchronization messages for synced players across the same channel. Broadsign uses outbound port 443 only on all players (see Required Firewall Rules). As a result, you do not need to specify a port.

For more information about synchronized networks, see Frame Synchronization.