How to Set Up Digital Signage for Your Restaurant, Step by Step

Why restaurants move menus to a screen

A printed menu board is fixed the day it's printed. Prices change, a dish sells out, or a breakfast menu needs to become a lunch menu at 11 a.m., and someone has to notice, design a new board, print it, and physically swap it. A digital menu board removes the printing and swapping. You edit the content once in a dashboard and every screen running that playlist updates on its own.

This walkthrough covers the whole path for a single restaurant: installing the player, activating a screen, uploading a menu image, building a playlist, and scheduling it so breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus switch automatically.

Step 1: Install the Android player

Veysign's player is a native Android app, not a browser running in kiosk mode. Install it on the Android TV, Android box, or tablet that will drive the screen behind your counter. Veysign supports Android 9 and newer, and the app is built to recover predictably after a restart and keep the last-known-good playlist in memory rather than depending on a live web page.

Step 2: Activate the screen with a 6-digit code

Once the player is running, it displays a 6-digit activation code on screen. In the dashboard, go to Screens and choose "Add screen," which opens a pairing page with a 6-digit code entry field and a link to install the Android player if you haven't already.

Enter the code, give the screen a name such as "Front Counter," and it links to your account immediately. Codes expire after 15 minutes, so generate the code on the TV first and enter it within that window. No proprietary hardware and no manual provisioning step are required. For more detail on supported hardware and re-pairing a screen, see installing and activating the Veysign Android player.

Step 3: Upload your menu

Go to Media and upload a menu image or video. Any image size is accepted, but for the sharpest playback we recommend keeping assets at 1920x1080 or smaller. If you run breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus, upload each one separately so you can schedule them independently later. Uploaded files show a "Processing" status for a few seconds while Veysign prepares them, then flip to "Ready" once they're safe to add to a playlist.

Step 4: Build a playlist

A playlist is the sequence a screen actually plays. Go to Playlists, create a new one, and add your uploaded media from the library on the left into the timeline in the middle. Each item defaults to a 10-second display time, which you can adjust per item, and you can choose landscape or portrait orientation to match how the screen is mounted.

Publish the playlist once you're happy with the order. Publishing bumps the playlist's version number, and screens sync the new version the next time they check in, without any manual push to the TV.

Step 5: Organize by location and schedule menu changes

If you're running one restaurant with one screen, you can assign the playlist directly to the screen and stop there. If you plan to add more screens, or more locations later, it's worth creating a location now (Locations, then Add location) and assigning screens to it, since schedules can target a whole location at once instead of one screen at a time.

To make the lunch menu appear automatically at 11 a.m. and the dinner menu at 5 p.m., go to Schedules and create a schedule per playlist: pick the playlist, the target (a device, a screen group, or a location), a start and end time, and the days of the week it should run. Veysign resolves overlapping schedules by priority and specificity, and handles the location's timezone and daylight-saving changes for you, so a lunch schedule set for 11:00 to 15:00 keeps firing at the right local time year-round.

What this looks like day to day

Once the menu boards are set up, the ongoing work is just editing playlists and schedules from the dashboard. A price change, a sold-out item, or a new seasonal promo becomes a media upload and a playlist edit, not a print job. And because each screen caches its playlist locally, a spotty restaurant Wi-Fi connection doesn't take the board down. It keeps showing the last successfully synced content until the connection comes back.

For a deeper look at how the offline behavior works, see how offline-first signage handles outages. If you're running more than one location, managing digital signage across multiple locations covers screen groups, locations, and team roles in more detail.