Key ideas and glossary

Last updated 2026-10-21

A short tour of the words you will see in the dashboard.

How the pieces relate

Your church has one or more sites. Each site has locations. A TV you pair becomes a screen that lives in a location. Media goes into playlists (or, for Slides, into decks), and these are put on a schedule.

Glossary

Organization: Your church (or ministry) in Church TV OS. Everything belongs to one organization, and nothing is shared between organizations. In the dashboard it is just called your church. If you belong to more than one, a church switcher appears in the header.
Site: A campus or building. Each site has a time zone that its schedules follow.
Location: A room or area at a site: Nursery, Lobby, Gym. Locations are tagged for the applications that use them (Kids, Signage, Slides, or several). Kids and Slides schedules are attached to locations.
Screen: One paired TV. It has a name, a location, an orientation (landscape or portrait), a default module and optionally a group.
Screen group: A set of screens that share a schedule, for example "Lobby screens". Add a rule or slot to the group and every screen in it follows.
Module: An application a TV can run. Today these are Kids, Signage and Slides. A screen can also be set to Off, which is a black screen.
Media library: Your uploaded videos and images. Each module has its own library, organised into folders.
Playlist: An ordered list of things to show. Kids and Signage each have their own playlists.
Item: One entry in a playlist: a video, an image, a countdown, a lyrics song, a YouTube video, a live stream, or (Signage) a text sign.
Deck: A Slides presentation: an ordered list of slides, with a theme. A person steps through it with the TV remote. See Slides module.
Slide: One screen in a deck: text, an image or video, a song's lyrics, a countdown, a live stream, or a blank screen.
Theme: A reusable look for decks: fonts, text colour and size, placement, margins and a default background. Change a theme and every deck that uses it changes.
Background: What sits behind a slide's text: a colour, a gradient, an image or a looping video, with an optional dim layer. It can be set on a slide, a deck or a theme.
Schedule: When something plays. In Church TV OS this comes in a few forms: one-time and repeating Kids schedules, one-time and repeating Slides deck schedules, weekly Signage slots, and module switches that decide which module a screen runs.
Series (rotation): A repeating Kids or Slides schedule that moves through a list of playlists (or decks), one per week: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3. At the end it can stop or start over.
Slot: A weekly Signage rule: "on these days, between these times, play this playlist on this screen or group".
Module schedule: A weekly rule that says which module a screen runs, such as Signage Monday to Saturday and Kids on Sunday. Without one, the screen's default module runs all the time.
Priority: A number that settles overlaps between weekly rules. The higher number wins; if they tie, the newest wins.
Role: What a person may do: owner, admin, editor or operator. See People and roles.
Entitlement: Whether a module is switched on for your church, and how many TVs your plan allows. The Church TV OS team manages this. See Billing and plans.