Glossary
A brief explanation of the terminology we use, this may help you understand our platform, editors and documentation.
Screen
A screen is a physical display, screen, projector or array which is situated at one of your locations.
Player
The player is the device which is running our Apple TV or Android TV app and is connected to your screen/display. Some screens have an integrated Android player running a screen specific version of our app, you can fins these in the Platopus Retail Store.
Locations
A location is any place where your screen is on show. This might be a single building or a multi-outlet location such as a shop, store, airport, trains station, bar, public house, school ... the list is endless!
Scene
A scene is our name for content which can be shown on a display. This can be a poster image, photo, video or slide.
Sequence
A sequence is collection or group of scenes which can be played back continuously on a display. These can be timed and have cut-effects to transition from one scene to the next.
Poster Image
A poster image is a piece of content specifically designed to fit on a screen. It will usually have an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 9:16. We recommend 4K (3840px x 2160px) or higher as the ideal size for generating images to ensure that they will look great on any screen.
Photo
A photo is a picture/file which is not necessarily designed to fit exactly on a screen. When a photo is displayed it will be scaled to fit onto your screen without any borders.For more information see our understanding photos page.
Video
A video is a short movie/file which can be played on your screen. It could be an actual movie shot on a camera and professionally edited, or perhaps a composition generated to display text and pictures dynamically.
Slide
A slide is our term for composite scene of background image, text, photos and images. These can be animated in a similar way to a slide you might build using presentation software.
Orientation / Portrait / Landscape
Orientation is the way your screen is installed. If your screen is oriented with the long edge at the bottom, this is landscape orientation. If your screen is oriented with the short edge at the bottom this is portrait orientation.
Group / Display Group
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Health / Status
The health or status of a screen/player is an indication of whether the player is currently connected to our platform and checking in. A status of green indicates that the screen has checked in within the last 60 seconds. A status of amber indicates that the screen have not connected in the last 1-5 minutes. A status of red indicates that the display has not connected for over 5 minutes and is disconnected. We do not charge for displays which are disconnected / in red status.
Schedule
A schedule is a set of rules which decide what a given screen should display at any given time. Schedules can be created for a group or a particular display.
Rule (schedule)
A rule is an element of a schedule which governs what a given screen should display at any time. It tells the screen to display a photo, image, video, sequence or other content. A rule can have a date range, day of week and time of day setting to control when the content is displayed.
Files / Assets
Files and assets are the poster images, photos and videos you upload to our platform.
Cut Effect
A cut-effect is the transition which occurs when changing from scene to scene. You can configure a variety of cut-effect on our platform such as fades and pushes.
Drift Effect
A drift effect is way of bringing a still photo to life by displaying it with a combination of panning/movement , zoom and fading. You can attach a drift effect to photos and backgrounds on your slides. In cinematography this technique is popular and is often referred to as 'rostrum camera'.
This technique was frequently used by documentary maker Ken Burns and less famously the late great Steve Jobs asked Ken personally for permission to call this effect the 'Ken Burns effect' in Apple's video software (also donating an amount of Apple equipment to Ken's suggested non-profit causes). We are not quite ready for that but we thought we'd pay homage to their mutual respect by including this morsel of information!
Connected Hour
A connected hour is any hour on any given day that your player is running and is connected to our platform. If you quit or put your player to sleep, or it disconnects from the platform you will not be charged.
Gigabyte Month
A gigabyte month is the peak amount of storage you have consumed in any given month rounded up to the nearest whole gigabyte. For example, if at any given time in a calendar month your total storage consumed is 23.5 Gb, you will be charged 24 gigabyte months.
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