Software Functional Capabilities

Automatic campaigns by frequency

Set time, dates and frequency per campaign, then generate the media plan, and the heuristic planner builds the playlist for every screen.

Campaign strategies

4 main strategies per campaign: auto by frequency, fixed playlist, auto by triggers and programmatic.

Placements and mass creation from Excel

Group campaigns into placements and create whole batches from an Excel media plan, with overbooking checks and media files matched by name.

Media plan generation

Generating the media plan builds a playlist for every screen from your campaign rules, delivers it to the players and returns a planning verdict for each.

Campaign categories

Weighted categories keep competitors' ads apart when the media plan is generated.

Ad-level active periods

Each ad can start later or stop earlier than its campaign, so phased creatives stay in one campaign.

Playback forecasts (cyclograms)

Preview the loop the planner would build for a screen at any future moment; the forecast flags overbooking, missing files and category conflicts.

Campaign and ad templates

Company-wide templates prefill settings for new automatic campaigns and ads; bulk uploads inherit them automatically.

Draft, stop, resume, copy

Campaigns move through the draft, active, stopped and archived states; copy any automatic campaign with its settings and ads.

A single playlist for the whole network

With automatic scheduling, 1 playlist and 1 schedule cover all screens; you edit ads, generate the media plan, and players pick up the changes.

Manual campaigns and playlists

Classic mode: drag ads into a playlist, attach it to a schedule, and the screens play the loop exactly as built.

Playlist playback policies

Playback policies (adhere, exceed, ignore or decrease campaign frequency, exact frequency with overbooking, or manual) control how the media plan fills airtime.

Manual and automatic playlists

A schedule can alternate manual playlists with automatic ones across its time periods.

Recurring schedules

Plan weeks and months ahead with daily, weekly or one-off schedules; segment timing is accurate to 30 minutes.

Default schedule for new screens

Mark a schedule as default and every screen you add starts playing without extra setup.

Filler campaigns

Filler ads fill vacant timeslots with house content. System fillers need the Adhere frequency policy; fillers by frequency also work under Exceed frequency and Decrease frequency and keep their own frequency.

Glue ads together

Campaign ads run back-to-back as a block once every n minutes, uninterrupted by other campaigns.

Ad groups and rotation

Group ads inside a campaign; the groups take turns in the order you set.

Per-screen repetition frequency

Define repetitions per minute for all screens at once or tune the rate screen by screen inside one campaign.

Weekday and time adjustment

Restrict any ad in an automatic campaign to chosen weekdays and hours; this dayparting is set in the ad’s own settings.

Geofenced playback

Draw an area on the map; ads on GPS-equipped vehicle screens play only while the screen is inside it.

Targeting by criteria

Mark screens and frames with criteria, then target with ALL/ANY/NONE logic; selecting 1,000 screens takes as long as selecting 1.

Ad-level targeting

Target individual ads to subsets of the campaign’s screens, so regional and phased creatives stay in one campaign.

Audience measurement (OTS)

OTS metrics from Wi-Fi sensors and camera-based people counting are shown next to ad play statistics.

Audience measurement ingestion

The player accepts Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC contact counts with signal levels from external sensors over local HTTP.

Images, video, HTML5, websites

4 content types on one screen: JPG/PNG, MP4/MKV video, offline HTML5 bundles and live web pages.

Media library

The library holds all creatives, with folders, search, previews and drag-and-drop upload.

Server-side transcoding

The server converts every uploaded video to consistent MP4 scaled to screen resolution. You can tune the pipeline (H.264 profiles Baseline to High10, speed presets, CRF, FPS cap, audio stripping) or switch encoding off.

Several resolutions in one ad

Upload files of different resolutions into a single ad; files bind to matching screens on their own, or you drop them onto ratio groups and single resolutions.

Offline HTML5 creatives

A ZIP with index.html is stored on the player and rendered there, so dynamic creatives keep playing without a connection.

Website ads

Point an ad at any URL; the player renders live web content on screen.

Interactive advertisements

Programmable HTML5 creatives read screen, frame and campaign metadata, plus GPS position on mobile players, over the player’s JavaScript bridge, so 1 creative serves many locations.

Custom variables

Typed variables attach to files, screens, frames, playlists, campaigns or ads and cascade by precedence into HTML creatives.

Bulk ad creation

Drop a batch of files onto an automatic campaign by frequency, and CS Play creates the ads automatically with template settings applied.

Screen frames

Split a player’s output into independent zones (ads, weather, news ticker) with X/Y placement and Z-order layering.

Frame layout copying

Copy a frame layout from another player of the same resolution; it replaces the target’s frames.

Video walls

Composite screens turn several physical panels into one canvas assembled from per-panel segments.

Settings policies

Define player and TV settings once as a policy and assign it to any set of players.

NovaStar LED brightness control

CS Play controls the brightness of 6 NovaStar controller models directly over a serial port and sets the baud rate automatically.

Scheduled brightness

Time-of-day brightness from 0 to 100 percent, with a sunrise/sunset curve generator, is configured in player settings policies.

Scheduled transition effects

Ads fade in and out with durations set to the millisecond, and you can switch the effect by time of day.

Mobile player type

Vehicle-mounted players have a player type of their own: GPS/GLONASS position feeds targeting, geofencing and creatives.

Visible vs physical resolution

Players declare visible and physical resolution separately, so content fits LED panels that scale internally.

Screen composition

Screens are logical surfaces assembled from player frames — auto-created with each player or composed manually.

Player device accounts

Each device is a full account of its own with a license slot, frames and geo-metadata, and the fleet list exports to CSV.

Screen groups

Organize screens into a nested tree, then filter the list, target schedules and delegate access by group.

Windows, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, Android

One player across Windows and Ubuntu (64-bit), Raspberry Pi 3 images, and Android, rooted or stock.

Documented hardware tiers

Hardware sizing runs from a dual-core CPU with hardware x264 decoding for Full HD up to GT-750-class GPUs for 4K media facades.

Budget Android LED controllers

Runs on everything from single-core LED boxes (SySolution Y10) to 8-core Tismart units driving 4 frames at up to 4K.

Player duplication

Grow the fleet fast: duplicate an existing player’s parameters or create N identical players with auto-indexed names.

Scheduled device reboot

Rooted Android players reboot automatically every day at a set local time, which helps prevent freezes.

Offline content update via USB

When a player has no uplink, download the update ZIP to a USB drive and plug it in; the player validates versions, updates itself and resumes playback.

APT repository install

Ubuntu players install from the CityScreen APT repository, so you can script the install and upgrade every player across the fleet.

Silent MSI mass deployment

Deploy Windows players unattended via msiexec with PIN, autorun and cache flags set on the command line.

Screen photo capture

CS Play CamGrabber cameras photograph tracked ad plays. You can browse the photos by campaign and ad and export a filtered ZIP.

Device state visibility

Players report their device state, free disk space and installed software versions to the CMS.

CS Play CamGrabber photo reports

With a paid CS Play CamGrabber license, CS Play photographs ad plays: the first plays of each ad, every play of a chosen campaign or a daily re-shoot; photos are delivered once the device is back online.

Events audit

Changes to campaigns, ads, users, players, playlists, schedules and media are logged with who changed what and when, and the log can be filtered by period, type and author.

Event notifications

The bell gathers the operator’s day in one place: a player dropped out, a media plan finished, an export is ready, encoding failed, a screen raised an SOS.

Email alerts

Email tells subscribed users when a player goes offline, and tells moderators when a campaign is confirmed or declined.

Installation metadata

Each installation carries its OTS, GRP, azimuth, placement and downtime, which together form the inventory passport that programmatic buyers read.

Ad play statistics

CS Play logs every ad play. You can filter the log by date, campaign, ad and screen, and it shows OTS where audience measurement is enabled.

Report export

Download ad play statistics as CSV or XLSX for billing and client reporting.

Inventory dashboard

Shows saturation and overbooking for every frame across the network on one page.

Proof-of-play reports

The player logs every ad play and reports it to your account. Players updated by USB keep proof-of-play on the device until the connection returns.

Programmatic (RTB)

Sell inventory programmatically through CS Context: RTB and private deals, with a per-screen switch.

License-metered players

Every active player consumes 1 license, so each new player needs a free license.

Partner network

Delegate a slice of the inventory to partners: group-scoped accounts plus per-group caps on the airtime they can book in each schedule.

Client directory

Bind campaigns and media files to advertiser clients, group them, and filter campaigns in any state by client.

Local player HTTP API

Query the live playlist per frame, feed audience measurement data, and fire triggers over plain HTTP on port 9036.

Trigger-driven playback

External systems fire ads via API in 4 modes: interrupt, queue, queue-or-interrupt and queue-or-discard.

Trigger campaigns

Upload event-driven ads once; each gets a trigger name your sensors, kiosks or backends call to put it on screen.

CS Play Trigger desktop app

Fire triggers by hand from the player machine: the app lists the ads the player has downloaded by frame, and one click puts a creative on the screen.

WebDAV access to photo captures

Pull your CS Play CamGrabber photo captures over standard WebDAV, read-only and scoped to your own organization, with credentials the system issues.

Role-based access

Roles range from Administrator to read-only Observer, and an account can be scoped to a screen group.

Two-way PIN pairing

Pair in either direction: a 6-digit PIN from CS Play entered on the device, or a 6-character code from the device entered in CS Play. Re-pairing moves the player identity to a new device.

Localhost-only player API

The player’s HTTP API listens only on 127.0.0.1, port 9036, so only software on the same device, such as CS Play CamGrabber, can call it.

Organization settings

Organization-wide defaults for new campaigns and ads are set on one settings page.