Managing one screen is easy. Managing forty screens across twelve locations one at a time is a different job entirely, and it's exactly the kind of job that eats an afternoon if your signage platform makes you touch each screen individually. Screen groups exist to remove that per-screen busywork.
The problem with managing screens one by one
Picture a straightforward, common task: your seasonal promo just changed, and it needs to go out to every front-counter screen at every location by end of day. Without grouping, that means opening each screen individually, assigning the new playlist, checking it took, and moving to the next one — and repeating that every time the promo changes again.
What a screen group actually does
A screen group lets you bundle screens together — by location, by role (front-counter vs. back-office vs. lobby), or any grouping that matches how you actually think about your fleet — and then assign a playlist to the whole group in one action. Every screen in that group updates together, instead of you repeating the same assignment across dozens of individual screens.
- Group by location: "all screens at Store 4"
- Group by role: "all drive-thru boards across every location"
- Group by anything else that matches your operation — seasonal displays, lobby screens, break-room TVs
Where this actually saves time
The time savings compound with every location you add. Updating one screen's playlist manually might take a minute; updating forty screens manually takes forty times that, plus the mental overhead of making sure you didn't miss one. With a group, updating forty screens takes the same one action as updating one — you assign the playlist to the group, and every screen in it picks up the change.
This matters most in exactly the situations that come up constantly in multi-location operations:
- A pricing update that has to go out everywhere at once, correctly, with no location left on the old pricing
- A seasonal campaign launching across the whole chain on the same day
- A compliance or safety message that legally needs to be showing on every relevant screen, not just most of them
- Reverting quickly if a new playlist has an issue — fix it once at the group level rather than location by location
One dashboard, many sites
Screen groups work alongside the broader multi-site management view, so whether your locations are cloud-managed, offline Hubs, or a mix of both, you're working from one dashboard rather than juggling separate logins or separate tools per site. That consolidation is what actually makes multi-location management sustainable as you add more locations — the complexity of the underlying screen count doesn't have to translate into proportionally more admin work for you.
Getting started
If you're currently managing multiple locations screen by screen, the fastest win is usually to group by location first — it's the most intuitive grouping and immediately turns "update twelve stores" into "update one group, twelve times faster." From there, role-based groups (all drive-thru boards, all lobby screens) tend to be the next natural layer once the basic location grouping is in place.