Digisini vs ScreenCloud
the SMB version

Four situations decide it, and they are the ones that actually come up in a business:

• Two televisions showing identical content. Almost always two screens, ours included, because each one connects on its own. Worth confirming rather than assuming, because it is the first thing people expect to be free.
• A television that is switched off for the season. A beach bar shutting for five months still has the pairing. Ask whether the count is «paired» or «playing», because those two words produce very different invoices.
• A spare player in a drawer. Kept for the day one fails. If it is paired, it may be counted; if it is not, swapping it in on a Saturday means pairing under pressure.
• A screen split into four zones. One display, four regions of content. Usually one screen, sometimes not, and it is the least documented case of the four.

None of these is a trick. They are ordinary consequences of choosing a billing unit, and any vendor will answer them plainly if asked before signing rather than after. What matters is that a per-screen price without its definition is not a price — it is a starting point for a conversation you have not had yet.

For the record, on our side: paired displays are counted, whether or not they are currently playing; a spare player left unpaired costs nothing; and zones within one display are one screen. Unpairing takes a few seconds from the dashboard, which is what a seasonal business wants to hear.

The one-line version to send any vendor before you commit: «does a paired but switched-off screen count towards my plan?» The answer tells you more about the pricing than the pricing page does.

The symptom is predictable and easy to mistake for something else: the screen shows the same content for a month after the migration. It is rarely because the new tool is worse. It is because the routine no longer runs on its own, and a task that has to be thought about is a task that waits for a quiet moment that never comes.

Which gives a straightforward test, and it is not a feature comparison. Before committing, have that person — not the buyer, not a salesperson in a demo — do their normal weekly update inside the trial. If it takes longer than what they do now, the rest of the evaluation does not matter much: the tool with more capability and one extra tap per update is a downgrade for the only person who ever touches it. A switch is worth making when the daily action gets shorter, and worth questioning when it merely gets more powerful.

To be straight about it: this argument works against us whenever we are the new tool, which is most of the time. We would still rather you ran that test, because the alternative is a customer who migrated, stopped updating, and concluded a year later that screens do not work.

Everything that actually decides shows up after the trial period. The day something has to change in a hurry with people waiting. The month nobody touches it and you have to remember on the way back. The update that moves a button. The new person who has never seen this before. None of that fits into fourteen days — not because the window is short, but because those situations need time to pass, not for you to test faster.

And there is one thing a trial cannot show by definition: how they respond when something goes wrong. In fourteen days little goes wrong, and if it does you get the attention of the sale, which is genuine and is the best you will ever see. What you are buying is the behaviour of month fourteen, with the payment already on file. That cannot be trialled: it has to be asked of somebody a year in, and that one conversation is worth more than the whole trial.

Which is why the most informative thing about a trial is not whether you liked it. It is how many times you had to ask something, and above all whether the answer was written down anywhere or had to be requested. A tool that made you write three emails in two weeks will make you write thirty in a year, and in a year you will not have the appetite you have now. That number does predict the rest.

Straight with you: the same applies to trialling us. If in two weeks you had to ask us things that should have been written down, that is a data point about us, and you should use it.