"Is the signage actually working?" is a surprisingly hard question to answer just by looking at a screen once in a while. You might catch it mid-playlist looking fine and have no idea it was blank for two hours yesterday, or that one screen in the back has been quietly underperforming for a month. Proof-of-play reporting exists to answer that question with data instead of a spot check.
Uptime percentage: is the screen actually there when it should be
Uptime % is calculated from real heartbeat history — the device periodically checks in, and the report tells you what fraction of the expected time it was actually online and playing. This sounds simple but it's the single most useful number for catching problems early. A screen sitting at 60% uptime this week didn't suddenly fail; it's been having a problem you haven't noticed yet, and the report surfaces it before a customer or a client does.
Example scenario: you manage screens across five store locations and one of them has had a flaky power strip for weeks, causing the display to reboot intermittently. Nobody's filed a complaint because it's usually working when staff glance at it. The uptime report shows that location sitting well below the others, which is your signal to actually go check the hardware before it becomes a bigger problem.
Plays-over-time: when is content actually being shown
A plays-over-time chart shows you the volume of content plays across a period, which is useful for spotting patterns you wouldn't catch otherwise — a playlist that stopped rotating at a particular time of day, a screen that's technically online but not actually cycling through content, or simply confirming that a scheduled campaign ran when it was supposed to.
Per-playlist and per-media watch-time breakdown
This is where reporting moves from "is it working" to "is it working well." A breakdown of watch time by playlist or by individual media item tells you what's actually getting airtime, which matters in two very different situations:
- Ad compliance. If you've sold or promised airtime to a sponsor, brand, or internal department — "this promo runs for X hours a week across Y screens" — the per-playlist breakdown is your evidence that it actually happened, not just that it was scheduled to happen.
- In-house content effectiveness. If you're deciding whether a particular menu promo, safety message, or announcement is worth keeping in rotation, watch-time data tells you how much actual airtime it's gotten relative to everything else, which is a much better basis for that decision than a gut feeling.
Device leaderboard: comparing screens at a glance
When you're running more than a handful of screens, a leaderboard view ranking devices by uptime or activity is a fast way to spot outliers without digging into each one individually — the underperforming screens surface to the bottom where you'll actually notice them.
Getting the data where you need it
Reports export to CSV or PDF, which matters if you need to hand proof-of-play data to a sponsor, a franchise office, or your own management rather than just looking at it on a dashboard. For cloud and Hub-connected accounts, a scheduled email digest can also deliver this on a recurring basis, so you're not logging in every week just to check whether anything's gone wrong — the report comes to you instead.
The bottom line
Proof-of-play reporting turns "I think the signage is working" into an actual, exportable answer. Whether you're troubleshooting a flaky screen, proving contracted airtime happened, or deciding what content deserves to stay in rotation, the numbers do a better job than a walk-by glance ever could.