What is DisplayHive?

Overview

DisplayHive is an open-source digital signage platform that runs on your own server, completely under your control and licensed under the MIT License. It scales from a single welcome sign that office staff can update through a simplified view, to info screens and menu boards, all the way to full conference deployments with 100 or more screens.

Devices

Drive many screens from one shared design set, with content that is either common to all of them or individual per screen. You can connect hundreds of devices to DisplayHive if needed. A device can be almost anything that runs a browser: old tablets, iPads, PCs, Raspberry Pis, smart TVs, and so on. The only requirement is a browser that can autostart with a DisplayHive screen as its start page.

Design

DisplayHive lets you build your own design. Dynamic backgrounds, gradients, graphics, font definitions, and many other options are configured through the admin interface, with no custom HTML or JavaScript required. Layouts can differ from screen to screen, so you stay in full control of what content is shown where.

Content

An admin can create content elements that hold multiple content fields of different types: text, rich text, links, images, icons, arrows, tables, countdowns, and even a Pretalx schedule. Content fields can be pre-filled, locked, or hidden, so an editor only ever sees what matters for the job.

Instant Content updates

Changes are live. There is no cache to clear and no reload to wait for: edit something, hit save, and it updates on the screens immediately, whether they are in the next room or a hundred kilometres away. Every content item can carry a display duration and an optional active window, so it only appears during a set date-and-time range.

Offline Mode

If a device loses its connection, the display keeps showing the current playlist until it reconnects to the network. On reconnect, every display is updated to the current state immediately. No manual refresh is necessary — it just works.

Live Preview

When you edit a design or a content element, you always get a live preview that shows exactly what any screen is rendering, without walking over to it.

Rights Management

DisplayHive has built-in rights management. Access is controlled by fine-grained rights, granted through nestable groups, with per-user allow/deny overrides and a built-in Superadmin group. Accounts are created, deactivated, and deleted from the admin panel, and login uses rate-limited JWT sessions with lockout on repeated failures.

DisplayHive is MIT-licensed and has already been tested at multiple events.