What Are Labels in Skykit Beam?

Overview

Labels give you the ability to assign custom labels or "tags" to your displays and playlist entries, allowing you to organize displays in groups and publish content to one or more displays at a time.

Let's say you have displays placed throughout your office in different departments, such as Marketing, Research and Development, and Human Resources. You want to be able to quickly publish information to all the displays located in a specific department without having to manually publish content to each display individually.

In Beam, you can create a label called Marketing and assign that label to all of the displays located in the Marketing department. You can then assign the Marketing label to all playlist entries that show marketing-related information for your company. Now those playlist entries will only play on the displays that have the Marketing label.

How Labels Work

In order to use labels most effectively, it's helpful to know how they work.

If your display and playlist entries have only one label each, things are pretty simple. For example, you might have a label category called Seasons, and within that category you have four labels: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. The display is labeled Fall and your four playlist entries are labeled Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, respectively. In this case, only the playlist entry labeled Fall will play on the display because it's the only one with a label that matches the display's label.

But what if the display and the playlist entries have multiple labels? 

In this case, it's important to be aware that, when it comes to matching up labels, Beam looks for Label 1 OR Label 2, not Label 1 AND Label 2. This means that a display and a playlist entry only need to have one label in common for the entry to play on the display—the labels don't all have to match. If a display is assigned the labels Morning and Afternoon, it will play any playlist entry that is labeled either Morning OR Afternoon. The playlist entry does not have to have both Morning AND Afternoon labels in order to play on the display.

Let's look at how this plays out when you have one display and four playlist entries, each with two labels:

Display Labels: Fall, Spring

Playlist Entry 1: Fall, Spring
Playlist Entry 2: Spring, Summer
Playlist Entry 3: Summer, Winter
Playlist Entry 4: Winter, Fall

Playlist entries 1, 2, and 4 will play on the display because they each have at least one label that matches one of the display's labels. Playlist entry 3, however, will not play on the display because it doesn't have any labels that match the display's labels.

If a playlist entry has not been assigned any labels, it will play on a display that does have labels. Similarly, if the display has not been assigned a label and the playlist entries do, all the entries will play on the display.

Next Steps

Now that you've learned about labels in Beam and how to best organize your displays using labels, learn how to create labels in Beam.