Video wall: several screens, one single image

A video wall isn't a group of screens playing the same thing. It's a single image, split into as many portions as there are panels, with each screen showing only the piece that belongs to it. Seen from a distance, the assembly forms one continuous surface, and a visual can travel across the whole wall from edge to edge.

Each tile therefore knows its place in the grid: its column, its row, and the share of the image it needs to render. This calibration is done at setup, screen by screen. It's the step not to rush — a misplaced tile throws off an entire row, and the flaw becomes obvious the moment a piece of content crosses the boundary between two panels.

Then comes synchronisation. On a still image, the requirement is minor. On video, it becomes very visible: if one tile runs half a second ahead, an object crossing the wall breaks apart as it passes from one panel to the next. Playback is therefore synchronised across tiles, and content is cached locally on each device — which stops one panel from waiting on the network while its neighbours have already moved on.

This is what sets video wall billing apart from a regular screen fleet. A four-panel wall remains a single display surface: counting it as four independent screens wouldn't make sense, since there's only one piece of content, one playlist and one schedule to manage.

Licence tiers follow that logic. The primary tile — the one driving playback — falls under the Premium licence. Secondary tiles, which only render their portion of the image, fall under the cheaper Lite licence.

A four-panel wall therefore counts one primary tile and three secondary tiles; a nine-panel wall, one primary and eight secondary. From 50 devices of the same type, a discount becomes negotiable, and the subscription remains contract-free. Full pricing is on the Pricing page.

One thing worth knowing before getting started: the Free plan doesn't support video walls. Its three free screens let you try out playback, playlists and scheduling, but assembling a wall requires a paid plan.

Software can't fix what the hardware gets wrong. A video wall is first and foremost an installation problem, and the decisions that matter are made at purchase time, not at configuration time.

Three factors decide the final result:

• Panel bezels. Between two screens there's always a black band, formed by one frame plus the other. On a consumer TV, that band runs into centimetres and cuts the image bluntly. Panels designed for video walls have very thin bezels, on the order of a few millimetres, letting the eye piece the whole image back together. It's the first purchasing criterion, ahead of resolution.
• Physical alignment. A panel offset by three millimetres shows up on any line crossing the wall, no matter how carefully the software is calibrated. Wall mounts designed for video walls allow fine adjustment once the screens are up; an ordinary TV mount doesn't, and there's no fixing it afterwards.
• Hardware consistency. It's strongly recommended to build the wall from strictly identical screens, same model and ideally same production run. Two panels from different generations won't render white the same way, and that colour-temperature gap stays perceptible even when the geometry is perfect.