Introduction to Content Management for event screens
How Content Management plans the digital content for an event and schedules it onto screens, LED walls, displays and print areas, with files from the event Drive.
Content Management is the plan for what appears on every screen at your event, and when. It keeps a list of the content the show needs, a list of the places that content will be shown, and a schedule that puts the two together.
Why Content Management Matters
Screen content usually lives in a spreadsheet: one tab for the LED wall, one for the lobby displays, a column of file names that may or may not match what was delivered. When a session moves or a sponsor sends a new cut, someone has to find every row that mentions it and hope the file name still points at the right version.
Content Management keeps that plan inside the event. Each piece of content is one record, tied to the files in the event Drive that make it up and, when it belongs to a session, to that activity in the schedule. Each screen is one record too. Scheduling a piece of content on a screen is a block with a start and an end, so the same welcome video can sit on the main wall at doors and on the lobby screens all afternoon without being entered twice.
How Content Management Works
There are two lists and a schedule that joins them.
Content is anything that will be shown: a walk-in loop, a speaker's slides, a sponsor reel, a printed program. Each item has a name, a description, an optional activity (leave it empty for content that belongs to the whole event), and the files from the event Drive that hold the actual material. Attaching a deliverable ties the content to the file a collaborator still owes you.
Surfaces are where content appears: LED walls, video screens, projectors, digital signage, or print areas. Each surface has a name, a description, an optional area, an exact location in your own words ("Stage left IMAG"), and an optional raster map, a file from the Drive, usually a map image, that shows where it is.
A content block schedules one piece of content on one surface. It can have a start and an end time, or neither if the timing is not set yet. The surface's schedule is shown as a timeline, and the Surfaces tab shows every surface's schedule together.
flowchart LR
F["Drive files"] --> C["Content"]
A["Activity (optional)"] --> C
C --> B["Content block (start, end)"]
S["Surface"] --> B
AR["Area (optional)"] --> S
M["Raster map (optional)"] --> SWhat Content Management Does Not Do
Content Management is a planning tool. It does not play content on a screen or send anything to a media server, and it does not assign content to collaborators or create deliverables. To collect files from a collaborator, create a deliverable in the event Drive, then attach it to the content item.
Content Management appears in the event sidebar for event admins.