How to run a 30-day digital signage pilot before you roll out
Quick answer: DigitalSignage.com recommends a 30-day pilot on 3 screens, free with no credit card, before any rollout of 10 or more screens: week 1 install and pair the players, week 2 run the real content, week 3 break things on purpose (pull the power, pull the network), week 4 measure against the baseline and decide. Write one goal and one KPI per screen, record the baseline first, and put the go or no-go criteria in writing on day 1. If it passes, every screen is billed at $3 per screen per month once the account has 4 or more, so 50 screens cost $150 per month in 2026.
Key facts
- The DigitalSignage.com free plan covers a 3-screen pilot forever, with no credit card, no ads, no watermark, about 90 percent of the features and content scheduling included.
- Our deployment planning guide calls for a pilot before any deployment of 10 or more screens, and our mistakes guide lists skipping the pilot among the 12 mistakes that waste budgets.
- A pilot that never pulls the plug has not tested anything: the player must come back by itself after a power cut and keep playing from its local cache through a network cut.
- Pairing takes about 5 minutes per screen: SignPlayer shows a registration code, which you type into SignStudio under Register SignPlayer.
- Pilot hardware is the TVs you own plus a $40 to $100 Android TV stick or an $81 to $137 Raspberry Pi kit per screen, so 3 screens cost $120 to $411 one-time.
- A good retail result is a promoted item lift of 15 to 25 percent against a baseline; an office screen is judged on message recall and a school screen on event attendance.
- After the pilot, 10 screens cost $30 per month, 50 cost $150 and 100 cost $300 in 2026, every screen billed once the account has 4 or more.
Last updated October 23, 2026. Product facts from the SignStudio getting started, player management and scheduling documentation; pilot guidance from our deployment planning and mistakes guides; KPI benchmarks from our goals and KPIs guide; hardware prices from our cheap players and cost pages.
Why run a pilot before a rollout?
Because every problem a pilot finds on 3 screens costs 3 fixes, and the same problem found after a rollout costs 50. A pilot is a 30-day test of the real hardware, network, content and people, on screens that will stay in service if it passes, with a written decision at the end.
Thirty days is long enough to run a full weekly schedule four times, to hit at least one holiday or odd day, and to see whether the content owner keeps updating after the novelty fades. Our deployment planning guide extends this to 2 to 5 pilot sites for 4 to 8 weeks before a deployment of 10 or more screens; the 30-day plan below is the single-site version.
What happens in each week of the pilot?
Each week has one job: install, run, break, decide. Do not move to week 2 until every player has survived a weekend unattended.
| Week | Goal | Tasks | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before day 1 | Agree the test | Write one goal and one KPI per screen, record the baseline, write the go or no-go criteria, name the owner and the content owner | A one-page pilot brief, signed |
| Week 1 | Install and pair | Mount or place 3 screens where they will live, install the free DigitalSignage.com SignPlayer on the TVs' sticks or Pis, type each registration code into SignStudio under Register SignPlayer, name each player after its location, confirm all 3 show online | 3 screens playing a holding scene over a weekend |
| Week 2 | Run the real thing | Load the real content plan (8 to 12 items), set the schedule with dayparts and an end-dated campaign, add one live component (sheet, calendar or feed), have the content owner publish a change without help | A full week of the real schedule, one change made by the owner |
| Week 3 | Break it on purpose | Pull the power on each player and time the recovery, pull the network and confirm it keeps playing from cache, check brightness at the brightest and darkest hour, run the emergency scene and clear it, let a non-technical person fix a screen from the written checklist | A log of every test with pass or fail |
| Week 4 | Measure and decide | Compare the KPI with the baseline, review player status and uptime in SignStudio, read the content owner's time log, score the go or no-go criteria, write the rollout order | The decision, the scaling budget and the rollout plan |
Bottom line: the pilot brief written before day 1 is the deliverable that makes week 4 a decision instead of an argument.
Who needs to be involved?
Five people, and three of them for less than an hour a week; a pilot that needs a committee has already failed its own test.
| Role | Job in the pilot | Time over 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| Pilot owner | Writes the brief, runs the break tests, makes the call | 10 to 15 hours |
| Content owner | Keeps the sheet and the slides current without help after week 1 | 1 to 2 hours a week, logged |
| IT or network contact | Confirms outbound HTTPS from the screens, places the sticks or Pis on the right network | 2 hours in week 1 |
| Site contact (store manager, head of department, facilities) | Reports what people say, notices when a screen is wrong | 15 minutes a week |
| Sponsor | Approves the brief and the criteria, reads the week 4 report | 1 hour |
Bottom line: the content owner's logged hours are a KPI in their own right, because a rollout multiplies that time by the number of locations, not the number of screens.
What should you measure?
Measure one primary KPI per screen against a baseline you recorded before the first screen went up, plus one health KPI that says whether the screen was actually on and current. Our goals and KPIs guide gives the method; the table applies it to the usual pilot screens.
| Screen type | Primary KPI | Baseline method | Good result in 30 days | Health KPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retail promotion | Units of the promoted item | Till data for the 30 days before | 15 to 25 percent lift against a control store | Online every day, price matched the till |
| Office communications | Message recall | 5-question quiz to 20 staff before and after | More staff can name this week's items | Content changed weekly by the owner |
| School hallway | Event attendance | Sign-ups for the same event type last term | More sign-ups per event | Announcements current every morning |
| Waiting room | Perceived wait | 2-question exit survey before and after | Lower reported wait at the same real wait | Now-serving or schedule zone live |
| Menu board | Average ticket or promoted item share | Till data for the 30 days before | Rise in the promoted item | Dayparts switched on time |
| Lobby or welcome | "Where is" questions at reception | Tally sheet for 2 weeks before | Fewer questions | Welcome sheet updated daily |
Bottom line: every KPI in the table is measured with the till, a tally sheet, a short survey or a sign-up list, so the pilot needs no sensors and no extra software.
Uptime, last check-in and a remote screenshot per player come from SignStudio player management, which is the source for the health column; proof of play, a log of which file played when, is an Enterprise feature and not needed for a pilot.
What content does a pilot need?
The real content, not a demo: 8 to 12 items the site would actually run, one live component, one scheduled change and one emergency scene. A pilot that runs the vendor's sample slides tests nothing about your content owner.
- Build the scene from a template in SignStudio at the screen's resolution and orientation.
- Add 8 to 12 real items at 7 to 15 seconds each, so the loop runs under 3 minutes.
- Add one live zone: a Google Sheet the content owner edits, a calendar, a weather or RSS component.
- Set a daypart (a different scene by time of day) and one campaign with an end date, so the pilot proves that content expires by itself.
- Prepare one emergency scene in the emergency priority campaign and test activating and clearing it in week 3.
- Have the content owner, not the pilot owner, make every change from week 2 onward and log the minutes.
Text sizes come from the viewing distance: about 1 inch of letter height per 10 feet, or 36pt body text at 10 feet on a 1080p canvas, from our typography guide.
What hardware do you need for a pilot?
The TVs you own and one candidate player per screen, bought from the list you would buy 50 of; a pilot on a laptop under the desk proves nothing about the $45 stick you plan to deploy.
Put a different candidate behind each screen if you have not chosen: an Android TV stick ($39.88 to $60), a Raspberry Pi 5 kit ($81 to $137) and a spare PC or Chromebox, as our cheap players guide lists them. All run the free DigitalSignage.com SignPlayer; Fire OS, Tizen and webOS TVs do not, so a smart TV in the pilot still needs a stick. Put at least one screen in the hardest place: the brightest window, the worst Wi-Fi, the room that gets locked at night.
What are the go or no-go criteria?
Write them before day 1, score them in week 4, and make the sponsor sign both; a criterion invented after the result is not a criterion.
| Criterion | Go | No-go |
|---|---|---|
| Primary KPI | Moved in the right direction against the baseline on at least 2 of 3 screens | Flat or worse on all 3 |
| Uptime | Every player online every day in weeks 2 to 4, from SignStudio player status | Any player offline for more than a day without being noticed |
| Power cut recovery | Every player back and playing by itself within 5 minutes | Any player needing a person to restart it |
| Network cut | Every player kept playing from its cache for the whole test | Any screen blank during the outage |
| Content ownership | The content owner made every change from week 2 at under 2 hours a week | The pilot owner was still publishing in week 4 |
| Brightness and placement | Readable at the brightest and darkest hour from the real distance | Unreadable at any hour |
| Emergency scene | Activated and cleared from SignStudio in under 1 minute | Not tested |
Bottom line: a no-go on content ownership or power recovery is a no-go for the rollout, whatever the KPI did, because those two failures scale with every screen you add.
What does scaling cost after the pilot?
The pilot's 3 screens stay free, and the moment the account has 4 or more screens every screen is billed at $3 per screen per month on mediaCLOUD Plus+, so the budget line is screens times $3 times 12 plus one player per screen.
| Screens after rollout | Software per month (2026) | Software per year | Players, one-time | Rollout note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 (pilot only) | $0, free forever | $0 | $120 to $411 | Already running |
| 4 | $12 (every screen billed from 4) | $144 | Add 1 player | The step from 3 to 4 bills all 4 |
| 10 | $30 | $360 | $400 to $1,370 | One wave |
| 50 | $150 | $1,800 | $2,000 to $6,850 | Waves of 10 to 25 percent of locations |
| 100 | $300 | $3,600 | $4,000 to $13,700 | Price the Enterprise tier on the calculator if you need proof of play or white label |
Bottom line: a 50-screen rollout costs $1,800 a year in software, which is less than the players, and the pilot screens are already three of the 50.
Roll out in waves of 10 to 25 percent of locations, as our deployment planning guide recommends, and repeat the week 3 break tests on the first screen of every wave. The public price calculator gives the exact rate at your count, since the per-screen rate is dynamic; the on-premise option, mediaSERVER, is a one-time $895 for organizations whose content must stay inside their own network.
Frequently asked questions
How to run a 30-day digital signage pilot before you roll out
Run 3 screens for 30 days on the free DigitalSignage.com plan with real content and the players you intend to buy. Week 1 install and pair with the registration code, week 2 run the real schedule with the content owner publishing, week 3 pull the power and the network on purpose and test the emergency scene, week 4 compare the KPI with the baseline and score written go or no-go criteria. If it passes, every screen is $3 per screen per month once the account has 4 or more.
How many screens should a digital signage pilot have?
Three, which the DigitalSignage.com free plan covers forever with no credit card. Three screens let you test three locations or three candidate players at once, including the hardest spot on the site. For a rollout of 10 or more screens across several sites, our deployment planning guide extends the pilot to 2 to 5 sites for 4 to 8 weeks.
What should a digital signage pilot measure?
One primary KPI per screen against a baseline recorded before the first screen went up: promoted item units for retail, message recall for an office, event sign-ups for a school, perceived wait for a waiting room. Plus one health KPI per screen: online every day, content changed by the owner, dayparts switched on time, all read from SignStudio player management.
What should you test by breaking things during a pilot?
Pull the power on every player and time its return; it should be back and playing by itself within 5 minutes. Pull the network and confirm the screen keeps playing from its local cache for the whole outage. Check readability at the brightest and darkest hour. Activate and clear the emergency scene. Have a non-technical person fix a screen from the written checklist.
Does a digital signage pilot cost anything?
Not for the software. The DigitalSignage.com free plan runs 3 screens forever with about 90 percent of the features, including scheduling. Hardware is the TVs you own plus a $40 to $100 Android TV stick or an $81 to $137 Raspberry Pi kit per screen, so a 3-screen pilot costs $120 to $411 one-time, and the players carry over into the rollout.
What happens to the price when the pilot becomes a rollout?
The 3 pilot screens stay free until the fourth screen is added; from then every screen is billed at $3 per screen per month in 2026. Ten screens cost $30 a month, 50 cost $150 and 100 cost $300, with the exact dynamic rate shown by the public price calculator. Players are a one-time $40 to $137 per screen, and electricity about $75 a year per screen.
Related guides
- Digital signage deployment planning
- Digital signage goals and KPIs
- 12 digital signage mistakes to avoid
- Digital signage health check checklist
- What happens when the internet goes down
- SignStudio player management
- Cheap digital signage players under $100
- Getting started with SignStudio
Try it on your own screens, free
DigitalSignage.com, which publishes this guide, runs a permanent free plan: the first 3 screens are free forever (no credit card, no ads, no time limit), then from $3 per screen per month with volume pricing via a public calculator. The free SignPlayer runs on Windows, Mac, Android and Android TV, Chrome OS, Raspberry Pi, iPad or any modern web browser. Start free · 2026 pricing