View a live preview or stream

Open a screen’s Overview tab to use Live preview. Tilecast asks the Player for a still image and refreshes it about every 20 seconds while the page is open. Select Refresh to request another image.

Choose the right view

Feature	Best for	Stored?	What it tells you
Live preview	Checking a recent screenshot from the Player	May be kept through preview or Snapshot history	What the Player captured recently
Watch live	Watching the Player while the live window is open	No	What the Player is capturing during that session
Snapshot history	Looking back at saved screenshots	Yes, according to Snapshot history limits	What the Player captured at those snapshot times
Activity / Proof of Play	Checking playback history and what Tilecast reported	Yes, according to Activity retention	What the Player reported as playing

A screenshot or stream only shows what the Player captured at that moment. It does not prove that the correct content played for an entire scheduled window.

Activity / Proof of Play records what the Player reported as playing; it is not a recording of the screen.

Watch the screen live

1. Open Screens > Fleet and select an online screen.
2. On Overview, select Watch live in Live preview.
3. Keep the Live stream window open while you watch.
4. Select Stop watching when you are finished.

Watch live is separate from the periodic preview. The stream runs only while the window is open, and closing it ends the session. Tilecast does not save the stream frames to previews, Activity, or backups.

If the stream connection ends, select Retry stream in the window to reconnect to the current session.

Frame rate and update speed depend on the Player and network. The baseline Watch live profile is up to 640 × 360 at 8 frames per second. Updated Edge Players request up to 960 × 540 at 10 frames per second. Each JPEG frame is capped at 100 KiB, and a slow connection drops intermediate frames instead of building a backlog.

Those are ceilings, not guaranteed rates. Capture time, JPEG encoding, Player load, and network latency can reduce the actual frame rate. At the hard frame-size ceiling, 8 FPS is about 6.4 Mbit/s before transport overhead; real signage frames are usually smaller. Close Watch live when you are finished so the Player stops doing the higher-rate capture work.

When preview is unavailable

• Watch live works only while the screen is online.
• Protected Player screens are not captured. AirPlay-mirrored output is also excluded.
• On Android, opening a protected screen during capture can discard the frame. Capture resumes after the Player displays an eligible window again.
• An offline Player cannot send a new screenshot, so the last preview may be stale.
• A stale Player with no cached screenshot shows Offline in the preview panel. If a cached screenshot exists, it remains visible as stale.
• On the Screens grid, a thin line under each preview shows how current the image is. Nothing shows while the image is fresh (45 seconds or less). An amber line with a moving segment means the image is between 45 seconds and 2 minutes old and Tilecast is waiting for another capture. A still red line means the image is more than 2 minutes old, or the Player reported a capture error. The age badge and Capture error label say the same in text. The line does not move when the system or Studio is set to reduce motion, and it does not show for offline, disabled, or revoked Players or for protected Player screens.
• Some Player or device states do not allow capture. Studio shows the preview as unavailable or reports a capture error.

Live preview shows a recent image; it does not prove that scheduled content played.

Next steps

• Use Activity to check Player-confirmed playback.
• Check screen status when the image is stale or unavailable.