Venue guide

How to show every game’s score on your bar’s TVs

Your screens are already showing the games your customers came for. This guide is about the other question they keep asking the bartender — what happened everywhere else — and how to answer it on a screen you already own, with no cable box needed for the scoreboard and no LED strip to mount.

Screen plans

Before the plans, one fact about how the app works, because every plan below follows from it.

Your leagues, teams, standings and extra slides live on your account, not on each television. Every screen signed in to that account runs the same rotation, in the same order, at the same time. So a screen plan is not a per-TV playlist. It is a decision about three things: how many of your screens run the board at all, where those screens hang, and what goes into the one rotation they share.

If you genuinely need different content on different screens — the college board over the patio, the pro board along the rail — that takes more than one account, and the arrangement depends on your venue. Tell us what you are picturing on the venue inquiry form and we will work it out with you rather than guess here.

4 TVs

In a small room, three screens stay on the broadcast and one becomes the board. Hang it where people are standing still: the end of the bar, above the taps, or facing the queue by the door. Keep the rotation tight so a glance is enough — a Smart Scoreboard for whichever league is in season, showing up to eight games on a single slide, plus full-screen game cards for the handful of teams your regulars actually follow, plus local weather by ZIP for the walk home. Set the board’s window to Live & Final and the slate reads as a running story instead of a wall of start times.

8 TVs

At eight screens the board earns a second position, because nobody should have to turn around to read it. Put one at each end of the bar and leave the middle to the broadcast. Both boards show the same rotation, which is the point: a customer who looks up at either end sees the same thing, and your staff only maintain one setup. With more room in the rotation you can add conference and division standings between the scoreboards, the AP Top 25 table on a college Saturday, and a golf leaderboard during a major. During a busy slate, switch the board’s window to Today or Live so finished games from earlier in the week stop taking up slides.

16 TVs

At this size, think in zones rather than in screens. Three or four boards usually cover a sixteen-screen room: one at each end of the main bar, one facing the host stand where people are waiting for a table, and one in the back room or on the patio that otherwise gets the least attention. They all run the same rotation, so the room stays consistent wherever a guest is sitting.

A room that size is also where the rotation stops being a single league. The board can carry several at once — an NFL scoreboard on Sunday, college football scoped to Notable ranked games on a Saturday that is far too big for any board to show whole, NBA, NHL and WNBA as their seasons overlap — and then fill the quiet stretches with market indices, lottery results, tennis and F1. The league guides cover what each one puts on screen. Because the whole rotation is one account, you flip the room from your phone: quick presets change what every board is showing in a tap when the good game moves.

League and competition names are used here only to describe what the app shows. TickrDash is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any league, team or governing body.

Hardware you already have

There is nothing to mount, nothing to wire and no box to rent. Pick whichever of these is already hanging on the wall.

A smart TV’s own browser

If the television opens web pages, it can run the board. Open the site on the TV, sign in, and leave it there. This is the cheapest screen in the building because you already bought it.

An Android TV or Google TV device

The TickrDash app installs from Google Play onto a television with Google TV built in, or onto a streaming box or stick that runs it. This is the best experience on a TV, and the easiest one to sign in from your phone.

Tablets on the bar

An iPad or iPhone runs the board as a web app once you add TickrDash to the home screen; an Android tablet runs it in the browser. Useful at the service well or on a table where a wall mount is not an option.

Any browser on any screen

A laptop or small computer connected to a monitor or another display works the same way — it is a web page. Fire TV is coming soon.

Two practical notes. While the ticker is on screen, TickrDash asks the device to keep the screen awake, so a board should not dim or drop into a screensaver mid-quarter; if one still goes dark, a battery saver, a screensaver timer or a stick’s own sleep timer is overriding the app. And the board feeds itself over your internet connection, so the scoreboard needs no cable box or receiver of its own. If you arrived here comparing quotes for a wall-mounted strip, the LED ticker alternative page sets the two side by side.

Set up each screen

Do the thinking once, on your phone. Each additional screen after that is a sign-in.

Sign the screen in

On an Android TV or Google TV, the app shows a short code and a QR code: scan it with your phone, or open tickrdash.com/link, sign in and enter the code. Nobody types a password with a remote. On a smart-TV browser or a tablet, sign in on the screen itself with Google, Apple or Microsoft. The Android TV setup guide walks through it step by step.

Build the rotation once

Open the control panel on your phone and switch on the leagues and teams you want, the Smart Scoreboards and their scopes, standings, weather by ZIP, market slides and the rest. Save, and every signed-in screen picks it up — nothing to restart and no need to get up on a chair.

Repeat on the next screen

Sign each remaining board in to the same account and it inherits the rotation you already built. One account can run multiple screens, which is what makes adding the fourth board a two-minute job.

Run it from behind the bar

Quick presets change the whole rotation in one tap. Tapping the slide counter at the bottom of a screen pauses it on the current slide when a table wants to keep looking at something, and the left and right edges step through slides by hand.

Scores refresh continuously while games are live — typically within a minute of the action — so a board left alone all afternoon stays current without anyone touching it. The setup hub lists every screen TickrDash runs on, and the live demo is the real product with non-live data if you want to see the rotation before you put it on a wall.

Venue pricing

Commercial licensing, custom integrations and multi-site pricing. Tell us how many screens you run, and where, on the inquiry form on the bars and venues page, and we will put a package together for your venue.

If you are testing the idea on a single screen first, the standard plans on the pricing page are the quickest way to see it in your own room before you scale it across the building.

Look up. Stay ahead.

Tell us about your screens and we will put a package together — or see the rotation running first.

Get venue pricing Try the live demo