A digital-signage control plane for scheduling and pushing content to screens in the field — built for reliability and remote management at scale.
Future Screen manages fleets of displays deployed in the wild. We're building the control plane: a system to schedule content, push it reliably to screens on flaky networks, and monitor the fleet from one place.
Screens live in shops, lobbies, and streets on unreliable connections. Content has to arrive correctly and on time, and operators need to trust that what they scheduled is actually on the wall — without driving out to check.
Where we started before writing code — framing the problem, the constraints, and the plan.
We assumed intermittent connectivity as the normal case, so devices cache schedules and reconcile when they reconnect rather than depending on a live link.
Operators needed to see health, current content, and last check-in per screen, so telemetry was part of the model from the start.
Scheduling content and delivering it are different problems; splitting them let each scale and fail independently.
A Next.js control plane and a Node.js delivery service over Postgres, containerised for reproducible deploys. Screens pull versioned schedules and report back, so the system stays correct through network gaps.
A Next.js app for scheduling content and monitoring the fleet.
A Node.js service versioning and pushing content to devices.
Postgres for schedules, devices, and check-in telemetry.
Containerised services for reproducible, portable deploys.
The trade-offs worth explaining — what we chose, and why it was the right call for this build.
Devices pulling versioned schedules survives network gaps and NAT far better than trying to hold an open push channel to every screen.
Immutable content versions make rollouts and rollbacks predictable and give every screen an exact, auditable state.
Building check-ins and health into the core model means operators can trust the fleet without physically inspecting it.
Every layer of the system, and the tools chosen to build it.
The parts of the build that carried the most product weight.
Plan and target content across groups of screens.
Devices reconcile after outages with no lost updates.
See health and current content per screen at a glance.
Containerised services for consistent rollouts.
Future Screen is in active development. The architecture is proven against the hard case — screens on unreliable networks — so scheduled content lands correctly and the fleet stays observable.
What the engagement taught us, kept honest rather than tidy.
Designing for intermittent connectivity first made everything downstream simpler.
Versioned schedules turned scary deploys into predictable ones.
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If the thinking above matches the standard you're after, tell us what you're building. We'll be honest about fit and outline a concrete first step.