Managing digital signage content across numerous screens can feel like an endless battle. The sheer effort involved in designing, editing, rendering, and manually distributing unique, relevant content for each location or player often consumes immense time and resources. But what if you could eliminate this content bottleneck and unlock unprecedented efficiency?
Your digital signage network is a powerful communication channel, and it's time to fuel it smarter. Just like automating other marketing efforts, automating your digital signage content workflow with a robust video automation solution can dramatically reduce your team's workload and significantly increase your output.
This article will show you how to leverage the combined power of Signagelive and Plainly to fully automate the creation of dynamic video content, seamless uploading, and intelligent delivery to multiple screens. Discover an all-in-one solution for generating mass amounts of personalized digital signage content and delivering it at scale.
How to Automate Digital Signage Content with Signagelive and Plainly: A 7-Step Workflow
Here’s how you can achieve this automation, drawing on the powerful integration between Signagelive and Plainly:
1. Configure Your Signagelive Players for Automated Delivery
The first step in automating your digital signage content delivery is to establish a baseline on your digital signage network. Publish a single playlist to all the Signagelive players where you want your automated content to appear. Signagelive is a headless digital signage platform, meaning its features are accessible via APIs, allowing for seamless integration with other systems.
2. Create Your Dynamic Video Template in Adobe After Effects
Next, you’ll create an Adobe After Effects template that will serve as the base for your automated videos. This template is uploaded to Plainly and is designed to allow for dynamic alteration of individual elements, such as images, text, and prices. The key idea here is that each video rendered from this template will have different elements based on the data you provide.
3. Structure Your Digital Signage Data in Google Sheets
To feed the dynamic template, you’ll need a structured source of data. Create a Google Sheet (Plainly also integrates with other tools like Airtable) containing all the information you want to change in each video render. Each row in the sheet will represent a different video variation you want to create. This is crucial for data-driven video automation.
4. Map Data Fields to Your Plainly Video Template
Within Plainly, you will then connect the specific fields (columns) from your Google Sheet to the corresponding dynamic elements in your After Effects template. This mapping process ensures that the data from a particular cell in your sheet will automatically alter the image, text, or other elements in the video template during rendering.
5. Establish the Signagelive-Plainly Integration Connection
This is where the automation magic connects the two platforms. You’ll add the Signagelive integration within Plainly, specifying details such as:
Which Signagelive network you are using.
The specific playlist in Signagelive where the rendered content should be imported.
The desired file names for the final video assets.
Crucially, the conditional tags to be applied to each individual asset based on your data.
Plainly's integration leverages Signagelive's open APIs for content upload and tagging.
6. Implement Dynamic Content Delivery with Signagelive Tagging
Signagelive’s tagging feature is essential for ensuring the right content goes to the right screen. By applying tags to both your players (e.g., tagging a player in Vienna with "Vienna") and the content assets rendered by Plainly (which the integration does automatically based on your sheet data and configuration), you create a condition. Only assets that have the tag matching the player's tag will appear on that particular player.
This tagging capability allows you to batch create thousands of assets and ensures that only the assets you want appear on the correct players. For instance, a player tagged "Viana" will only download content tagged "Viana".
7. Initiate Automated Video Rendering and Content Distribution
Once your Google Sheet and the Signagelive integration are configured in Plainly, the process becomes largely automatic. Simply add a new row of data to your Google Sheet, and this will trigger Plainly to render a new video variation. Thanks to the integration, this newly generated content is automatically imported into the chosen Signagelive playlist with all the correct tags already applied.
Combined with Signagelive's auto playlist update feature, any players with that playlist published to them will automatically download the new content as soon as it's added. The entire process, from content creation to display, is automated. As long as the integration is active with your Google Sheet, adding new data triggers content generation, import, and screen updates accordingly.
Why Automate Your Digital Signage Content Creation?
The integration of Signagelive and Plainly isn't just about efficiency; it's about transforming your digital signage strategy. This content automation solution allows you to:
Fast-track content output: Dramatically reduce time spent on manual editing and rendering.
Effortlessly localize content: Deliver targeted messages, even dynamically changing information like currency, for multiple locations or countries.
Meet audience demands: Consistently provide fresh, relevant content that keeps viewers engaged.
In today's fast-paced world, automating your digital signage creation and delivery is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity for scalable, impactful communication. By leveraging Plainly's dynamic video generation with Signagelive's robust headless platform and open APIs, you can ensure your digital displays are always working smarter, not harder.
Ready to Transform Your Digital Signage Workflow?
Are you ready to explore how Signagelive and Plainly can help you achieve seamless digital signage content automation? Learn more here: