A screen in your lobby has been blank for a while. The player is online. Your monitoring dashboard is green. And the first person to mention it is a visitor at the front desk, asking why the welcome board is dark.
If that sounds familiar, you already know the problem ScreenDetective solves. On most signage networks, the way you find out a display has failed is that someone complains. By then the screen has been wrong for a while, the message never landed, and your team is reacting instead of getting ahead of it.
The failure that hides in plain sight
Signage tends to fail the same way every time. A display goes blank or freezes on a stale frame, nobody in IT sees it, and it stays broken until a person on-site happens to notice. A ticket gets filed. Someone tries a remote fix. Sometimes a technician gets sent out. The whole time, the screen sits dark, and it’s usually the locations where displays matter most, like a branch lobby, a concourse, or a retail floor, where the failure gets felt.
Your monitoring may say everything’s fine
Here’s the part that catches teams off guard. You might already monitor these players, and it might be reporting all clear.
Most monitoring works at the network layer. It tells you a player is reachable and powered on. What it can’t see is what’s actually on the screen. A player can be perfectly online while showing a blank frame, or an image that froze an hour ago. The network says healthy. The screen says otherwise.
ScreenDetective looks at the content instead, at what the display is showing, not just whether the device answers a ping. Both signals matter. Only one of them reflects what your visitors actually see.
Why does a screen go blank or freeze? The cause varies. A codec the player can’t decode at that bitrate. A layout zone that loaded empty because a data feed didn’t return. A background process or update that left the app stuck on a single frame. ScreenDetective doesn’t try to diagnose any of that from across the network. It watches what the screen is actually showing, and when the picture is blank or frozen while the player still reports healthy, it flags it. The one exception is a true outage, where the player itself goes down — and that’s already covered by Korbyt’s active/inactive notification system.
How it works
Detect, alert, recover.
ScreenDetective continuously checks your managed displays for blank and frozen screens. Detection runs in the cloud through screenshot analysis, so there’s no agent to install on the player. The moment an issue is confirmed, the right people are notified through the same Korbyt notification setup your team already uses. No new console, no separate login, no extra vendor for security to review. It’s native to the Korbyt CMS, part of the Korbyt Anywhere platform, and runs on the admin roles and policies you already have.
Detection is always on. Recovery is your choice.
This part is worth slowing down on, because automated recovery makes plenty of teams nervous, and fairly so. Nobody wants a system rebooting a display on its own during an earnings day.
So recovery is opt-in, on your terms. Run it in detection-and-notification-only mode, where the system finds problems and alerts your team while a human handles every fix. Or turn on automated recovery inside a window you set, off-hours only for example, so it can act when something breaks but never during the hours you’ve ruled out. When it does act, it stays cautious: it restarts the application first, escalates to a reboot only if that fails, and marks nothing resolved until two clean screenshots confirm the screen is back. Plenty of teams in regulated industries start in detection-only mode, learn to trust the signal, then switch on recovery later.
What it won’t pretend to do
ScreenDetective isn’t a hardware fix, and we won’t claim it is. A dead power supply or a cracked panel can’t be solved by software. When the system can’t clear an issue, it flags it Recovery Failed and hands it to a person, screenshots and action log attached. It surfaces what it can’t fix instead of burying it.
That’s the change worth caring about. Your team stops hearing about failures from end users and starts seeing them first. The goal is simple: resolve the issue before it reaches the people standing in front of the screen.
Want to see it running on your own network? Request a demo.
