Slides module

Last updated 2026-10-21

The Slides module puts presentations on your TVs: announcements, sermon points, song lyrics, countdowns and live video. You build a deck in the dashboard, schedule it, and someone in the room steps through it with the TV remote.

Slides is a separate module, switched on per church, like Kids and Signage. If you do not see Slides in the menu, it is not on for your church yet. See Billing and plans.

What it is for

Presentations and announcements on a room's TV: a welcome slide, the week's events, a sermon outline.
Song lyrics from your shared song library, split into slides for you.
A countdown before the service, or a live stream in the middle of a deck.

It differs from the other modules. Kids plays a curriculum playlist, and Signage loops by itself. Slides is operated by a person with the remote: slides wait for Next unless you give them a time.

Decks and slides

Open Slides, Decks and press New deck. A deck has a name, a theme, and an ordered list of slides. Press + Add slide, reorder slides, and use the preview to see how each looks in landscape and portrait.

Text: A title and body text. Choose a layout (title and body, title only, body only, or lower third), left or centre alignment, and optionally a text colour.
Image or video: Pick a file from your Slides media library. Choose whether it fits inside the screen or fills it (and crops). An image can advance after a number of seconds; a video moves on when it ends, and you can turn its sound off.
Song: Pick a song from the library. It becomes one slide per verse or chorus, following the song's play order, with the section name shown if the theme asks for it. Tick Show song title first to open with a title slide (with authors, copyright and CCLI number) that holds until Next.
Countdown: A timer that counts down from the number of seconds you choose, with an optional title such as "Service starts in".
Live stream: A live video link ending in .m3u8 (HLS), with a title, Play sound on or off, and what to do if the stream is down (skip it or hold). The same notes apply as for Signage live streams.
NDI source (experimental): Only appears if the Church TV OS team has switched it on for your church. It shows a live NDI picture from a camera or computer on the same network as the TV, and plays only on TVs running a special test build of the TV app (the normal app skips it). Type the source name exactly as NDI shows it, for example STUDIO-PC (Camera 1). NDI finds sources by broadcasting, which does not cross VLANs, so if the camera is on a different network type its address too. NDI|HX is recommended for TVs on Wi-Fi. Choose what happens if the source is missing: skip it, or show a message.
Blank: A plain colour screen, black unless you choose another colour. Useful between sections.

Each slide can also have private notes for you. They are never shown on the TV.

Slides with no time set wait for the remote. Set seconds on a slide if you want it to move on by itself. Tick Loop at the end for the deck if it should start over after the last slide; otherwise the TV returns to its home screen at the end.

Themes

A theme is a reusable look: fonts, text size, text colour, alignment, where the text sits (top, centre or lower), shadow and outline, the margin around text, an optional church logo in a corner, whether song section labels show, and a default background. Open Slides, Themes to make them.

Choose a theme for each deck. Change the theme and every slide in every deck that uses it updates. A slide can override its own background; a deck can set a background for all its slides.

A slide's background is chosen in this order: the slide's own, then the deck's, then the theme's, then your church's primary colour.

Backgrounds

Colour: one solid colour.
Gradient: two colours and an angle.
Image: from your Slides media library. Choose Fill the screen (crops the edges) or show the whole picture on a fill colour you choose.
Looping video: plays silently, behind the text. Consecutive slides that share the same video keep it playing without a restart.

Every background has a dim setting (a black layer, up to 80%) so lyrics stay readable on a busy picture.

Video tips. Use 1080p MP4 (H.264), loops of 10 to 60 seconds, and keep files modest. A Fire TV stick has little storage and a long, heavy video can stutter or fill it. If a video is missing on the TV, the slide shows its fallback colour instead.

Songs

Songs live in the church-wide Songs library, shared with Kids. Add a song to a deck as a Song slide rather than typing the words again. Edit the song in the library and every deck that uses it updates. The song's lines per slide and play order decide how the lyrics are split. A song that a deck uses cannot be deleted until you remove it from the deck. See Songs.

Importing a PDF, PowerPoint or pictures

Already have the presentation? On the Decks page press Import PDF / PowerPoint (to make a new deck), or in a deck press Import PDF / PowerPoint next to + Add slide (to add to it). Choose or drop a file, tick the pages you want, reorder them with the arrows, and choose where they go: the end of the deck, after a position, or a new deck. The pictures are uploaded into a folder in your Slides media library, named after the file.

PDF: Every page is drawn in your browser at up to 1920 pixels and becomes a full-screen picture slide, shown whole on black. This keeps your fonts, layout and pictures exactly, but not animations or video. Portrait pages keep their shape.
PowerPoint (.pptx), editable: Each slide becomes a text slide: the title and the words, in your deck's theme. A slide that is only a picture becomes a picture slide. Speaker notes go into the slide's private notes. Slide order follows PowerPoint, and hidden slides start unticked. Layouts, fonts, shapes, charts and animations are not kept. Videos inside the file are listed: tick the ones you want (MP4 files under 50 MB) and they become video slides after their slide.
Pictures: Choose several PNG or JPG files at once. They are sorted by name (Slide2 before Slide10).

For the exact look of a PowerPoint, in PowerPoint choose File > Export > PDF (or PNG images) and import that instead.

Choose Time per slide: the default waits for Next on the remote. Limits: up to 150 pages per import, files up to 150 MB, each uploaded picture or video under 50 MB. If a page fails, the others still import and the failure is listed. When you add to an open deck the slides appear in the editor, and you press Save to keep them. You need the Slides module and an editor role.

Scheduling a deck

Slides is scheduled per location, like Kids. A TV shows the deck for its location. Use the Calendar (choose Slides deck when adding) or Slides, Schedule (also reachable from the Calendar's List view).

This week only puts a deck at a date and time (a dated schedule).
Every week repeats on the days you choose, with an optional end date. Add more weeks to make a rotation of decks: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3. At the end it can stop or start over.
For one date of a repeating schedule you can skip it (the rotation waits) or play a different deck (it still uses up its week).
A dated schedule replaces any repeating one it overlaps.
Copy week on the Calendar copies a week's dated deck schedules forward.

If a location is not yet tagged for Slides, a room tagged Kids can also be used for decks. For a screen that runs several modules, set its module schedule so it shows Slides when you want it. See Pair a TV and manage screens.

Running a deck from the TV remote

The TV's Slides home screen shows Now showing and Up next (the scheduled decks) and a Play button, with a note if the deck is still downloading. Press OK on Play to begin. While presenting:

Button	What it does
Right	Next slide
Left	Previous slide
OK	Open the slide list, to jump to any slide (songs show their section names)
Play/Pause	Black screen on or off
Back	Stop and return to the home screen

Slides with seconds set advance on their own, and videos move on when they end.

Portrait screens

Decks work on portrait TVs too. Text is sized to the screen and a landscape background is cropped to fill it, so check the portrait preview in the editor and use a portrait picture or video for a better result. See Portrait screens.

What you need

The Slides module switched on for your church.
Church TV OS app version 1.4.0 or newer on each TV. An older TV shows that the module is not switched on, because it does not know about Slides yet. The version is listed on the Screens page.
Editor access (or above) to the Slides module for the site, to build and schedule decks.

If something is wrong

The TV says the module isn't switched on. Update the app to 1.4.0 or newer, and check Slides is enabled under Settings, Your plan.
Black screen. Check the screen's module schedule and default module (it must run Slides), then check a deck is scheduled for its location right now. A TV only shows Slides when its module says so.
The deck does not appear on the home screen. Check the schedule on the Calendar for that location and time zone, and that the TV is online.
A video background is missing or stutters. Use a smaller 1080p MP4 and wait for the download to finish.
Lyrics are too long for a slide. Lower the song's lines per slide, or the theme's text size.
A song or media file will not delete. It is used by a deck. Remove it from the deck first.