How to Schedule Digital Signage Playlists by Time, Location, and Priority

Why scheduling is where most signage setups actually get used

Uploading a menu and building a playlist is a one-time task. Making the right content show up at the right time, every day, without someone manually swapping it, is the part that determines whether a signage system is actually useful. Veysign's scheduling engine handles this by letting you attach a playlist to a target, a time window, and a set of days, and it takes care of resolving what happens when more than one schedule could apply at once.

Creating a schedule

Go to Schedules and choose "New schedule." A schedule has:

• A playlist: the content that should play during this window.
• A priority: a number that decides which schedule wins if two overlap on the same screen at the same time.
• A target type and target: a specific device, a screen group, or a location. Targeting a location applies the schedule to every screen assigned to it.
• A timezone, start time, and end time: the local time window during which this schedule is active.
• Days of the week: which days the schedule runs, so a weekday lunch schedule doesn't also fire on Saturday.
• Optional start and end dates: for schedules that should only run during a specific range, such as a two-week promotion.

A typical setup for a restaurant might be three schedules on the same location: a breakfast playlist from 6:00 to 11:00, a lunch playlist from 11:00 to 15:00, and a dinner playlist from 15:00 to close, each active Monday through Sunday.

How overlapping schedules get resolved

Once you have more than one schedule targeting overlapping devices or times, conflicts become possible, for example a location-wide happy hour promotion that overlaps with a device-specific schedule on one particular screen. Veysign resolves this using priority and specificity together: a higher-priority schedule takes precedence over a lower-priority one, and where priorities are equal, a more specific target (a single device) takes precedence over a broader one (a location). When you create or edit a schedule that conflicts with an existing one, the dashboard shows you which schedules are involved and which one will actually take effect, so you're not left guessing which playlist a screen will show at a given moment.

Timezone and daylight-saving handling

Every location has its own timezone setting, and schedules run against that setting rather than the server's clock or the time on your own device. This is what makes a schedule reliable across daylight-saving transitions: an 11:00 to 15:00 lunch window keeps firing at 11:00 local time in spring and fall, without needing to be manually adjusted twice a year. For a team running locations in different timezones, this also means you can set every location's lunch schedule using that location's own local hours, rather than converting everything to one reference timezone yourself.

Turning a schedule on and off without deleting it

Every schedule has an Active toggle. This is useful for seasonal or occasional content, a holiday promotion, an event weekend, that you want to set up once and reuse rather than rebuild. Turn the schedule off when it's not running and back on when it is, and its playlist, target, timing, and priority all stay exactly as configured.

Putting it together

A location-based setup that covers a full week without daily manual work usually looks like this: a small number of playlists (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and maybe an evening promo), each attached to a schedule targeting the location, with priorities set so a temporary promotion can outrank the standing menu schedule when it needs to. Once that structure is in place, adding a new time-limited promotion is a matter of creating one more playlist and one more schedule, not touching the existing ones.

If you haven't built your first playlist yet, the restaurant signage setup guide covers that from the beginning. For teams managing schedules across several sites, managing digital signage across multiple locations covers how locations, screen groups, and team roles fit around the scheduling system described here.