Scheduled publishing

Scheduled publishing lets a playlist go live on devices automatically at a future time — no one has to be at a keyboard at the right moment.

Or ask the assistant — e.g. “publish the Lunch playlist to the lobby screen every day at 11:00.”

When to use it

  • A new campaign that should start exactly at 00:00 on launch day.

  • A menu that changes from breakfast to lunch at a set time.

  • Swapping messaging out of hours so screens are ready in the morning.

How it works

  1. Prepare the playlist as usual.

  2. Open the publish dialog (hover the playlist → Publish this playlist to devices).

  3. Under When, switch from Now to the Later tab and set the Date and time it should go live. (Use the Recurrent tab instead to repeat it over a date range.)

  4. Under Select devices, choose the target screens, then click Publish to selected devices.

  5. At that moment, impressBox publishes the playlist for you — no one needs to be at a keyboard.

The publish dialog with the Later tab: set a date and time

The publish dialog with the Later tab: set a date and time


Later — publish once at a set time

The Later tab has a single field, Date and time. The playlist is published to the selected screens once, at that moment, and then stays live like any normal publish. Leave it and impressBox does the push for you at the chosen time.

Recurrent — publish on a repeating schedule

The Recurrent tab re-publishes the playlist again and again on a schedule — useful for content that must be refreshed or re-asserted regularly.

The Recurrent tab: Date from/to, the three patterns, the Every/On controls and the schedule preview

The Recurrent tab: Date from/to, the three patterns, the Every/On controls and the schedule preview


  1. Date from / Date to — the window during which the recurrence runs. Click the calendar icon to pick a date, or leave both empty for no limit.

  2. Choose one of the three patterns (the tabs):

    • Periodically — repeat Every N minutes or hours. Under On: choose the days it runs — leave every day, or remove it and add specific days of the week. (Example: every 12 hours, every day.)

    • Periodically within a time frame — the same repeating Every interval, but only inside a daily time window (a from and to time, e.g. 09:00–18:00), on the chosen days.

    • At a recurring fixed time — publish once a day at one fixed time (e.g. 06:00), on the chosen days.

  3. As you set the pattern, impressBox shows a plain-language preview (e.g. At 12:12 AM) and the underlying schedule expression beneath it — a quick sanity check.

  4. Under Select devices, pick the target screens and click Publish to selected devices.

The device Schedule Management weekly view — each screen's daily on/off times

The device Schedule Management weekly view — each screen's daily on/off times


Example: play a playlist only during set hours

Say a Lunch playlist should play 11:00–15:00 every day, and your usual Main playlist the rest of the time. A published playlist keeps playing until another one replaces it — and the main playlist resumes by itself after the screen turns off and on — so you only need two recurring publishes (plus one first publish to get things running):

  1. Start the main playlist once. Publish Main with Publish → Now to the screens, so something is playing to begin with.

  2. Switch to Lunch at 11:00. On the Lunch playlist, click Publish this playlist to devices → Recurrent → At a recurring fixed time. Set At: to 11:00, leave On: as every day, pick the screens, and click Publish to selected devices.

  3. Switch back to Main at 15:00. On the Main playlist, do the same → Recurrent → At a recurring fixed time → At: 15:00, every day → the same screens → Publish to selected devices.

Each day the screen then shows Main until 11:00, Lunch from 11:00 to 15:00, then Main again (Main keeps playing overnight from the screen's own memory).

Good to know

  • You don't need a third schedule for "Main all day" — Main is simply what plays whenever nothing else has taken over.

  • The screen's on/off hours and these publish times don't have to line up. If the screen turns on at 10:00 but Lunch is scheduled for 11:00, Main plays from 10:00 to 11:00 — the screen resumes whatever main playlist it had, from its own storage (no internet needed at that moment).

  • Don't use Periodically within a time frame for this — it re-publishes the playlist during the window but doesn't stop it at the end, so the playlist would keep playing after 15:00. The two fixed-time swaps above are what limit it to 11:00–15:00.

How it relates to other timing tools

Scheduled publishing controls when a playlist goes live on screens. It's separate from display schedules (the hours a screen is powered on) and a content item's availability (its Show from / Show until dates). See Scheduling overview for how all three combine — for example, a holiday playlist published on 20 December, on a screen running 09:00–21:00, with a banner restricted to 24–26 December.