Building a Partner Network

A media owner rarely operates every screen alone. You may want to hand a slice of your inventory to a regional operator, a sales partner, or a sub-brand — letting them run their own campaigns on their own screens, while you keep control of the network as a whole and limit how much airtime each partner can book.

CS Play builds a partner network from three existing pieces working together:

  1. Screen groups — carve the inventory into a unit you can delegate.

  2. Group-scoped accounts — give the partner a login that sees only their group.

  3. Airtime quotas — cap how many seconds of each ad block the partner’s group can book.

None of these is exotic; the power comes from combining them.

Step 1 — carve the inventory into a group

Create a screen group for the partner and move their screens into it. The group is the boundary of everything that follows: the partner’s account, their campaigns, and their airtime quota all attach to this group.

A partner can have one group or a whole sub-tree — for example a North Region group with a nested group per city.

Step 2 — create a group-scoped account

Create a user for the partner (see Users and roles) and bind it to the partner’s screen group. Before you grant the access, confirm who is asking. A group-scoped account:

  • Sees only the screens and campaigns inside its group.

  • Cannot reach screens, campaigns, or settings outside its scope.

  • Sees, in the events audit, only the entries about campaigns, ads and media library files of its group.

Give the partner’s account the Advertising Manager role: inside its group it can create and run campaigns, ads and media library files. A group-scoped account cannot create users, so if the partner needs a team, an administrator who is not restricted to a group adds each account to the partner’s group.

Step 3 — limit airtime with group quotas

A partner’s share of the screen time is set as a screen-group quota on a schedule. A quota is a limit, not a reservation: it caps what the partner’s accounts can book, but it does not hold airtime for them, and accounts outside the partner’s group can still book the whole block.

On a schedule, open the Screen-group quotas section:

  1. Click Add screen group and pick the partner’s group.

  2. Enter the block-duration quota in seconds — how many seconds of every ad block the group’s accounts may book.

  3. Save the quota.

Each group can hold its own quota, so a single schedule can limit several partners at once. Repeat per group to set the limits your contracts require.

Quotas are expressed in seconds of block duration, not percentages. Size them against the total block length you configured for the schedule: a quota cannot be longer than the block, and CS Play refuses to save quotas that together add up to more than the block.

How the pieces fit together

Piece Where you set it What it controls

Screen group

Screens > Groups

Which screens belong to the partner

Group-scoped account

Users

What the partner can see and manage

Airtime quota

Schedules > Screen-group quotas

How much of each ad block the partner may book

See also