We assume you have setup your Apple TV(s) and have linked it to your EZ+ management application. Let’s create a simple image slide.

1- Open your EZ+ management application and either click on the + sign in the Slides row (you can also drag the image file to this area), or navigate to the Slides tab and click on the + button in the lower right corner of the screen to create a new slide

2- When starting a new slide, you will be automatically taken to the Files tab in the slide form. We want to add an local file image, so we are in the right place.
click on the Local Files button or the big + button to open the file selection menu

3- Now that you have selected your image, it will appear in the your slide form. If you don’t want to make any modification to the images, save the slide by clicking on “Save and Exit”. 

4- If you want to crop an image, we have to do some extra steps after selecting an image. Let’s say you have loaded the image as in above and now see the image as in Fig 3.a. Next we have to click on the edit button on the media navigator to crop the image

In the Crop Image window, you have some controls buttons such as Flip, Rotate Left/Right, Reset, Crop & Save, and Change Aspect Ratio.
When the Crop Image window load, the crop rectangle, which is marked by the red corners, is preset to 16×9 aspect ratio (Landscape). You can resize the 16×9 window and move it round. If you want to crop a Portrait image in 9×16 aspect ratio, click on the Change Aspect Ratio button and choose Portrait. If you want to freely move the corners around the image regardless of the aspect ratio, select Free Form in the aspect ratio selector.
After you are done, select Crop And Save to save the current selection. Note that if you want to keep the whole image, simply don’t crop the image  and save the slide image as stated in Step 3 above.

Now that you have created a slide, we have to add it to a playlist that is linked to a specific TV in order for the slide to be shown on that TV.
When you first create your account, we automatically create a new TV and a new playlist for you that is linked to that TV. Later on, we’ll show you how to create new playlists and link them to your TVs or change the playlist of the TVs.
For now navigate to you dashboard, and click on the playlist you want to modify

Let’s look into what settings are available in EZ+ for configuring your TVs. The settings for the TVs are accessible when editing single TVs and when editing TV-Groups. Let’s first look at configuring an individual TV and then we’ll have a brief review of configuring multiple TVs at one.

1- Navigate to the TV’s tab of your EZ+ management application where you can access the TVs or the TV-Groups through the vertical tab on the left of the screen. Note that you can also directly access your TVs in the Dashboard tab.

2- After clicking on a TV you will be taken to the TV-form where you can modify and adjust the settings of that TV. At the top of the page, we have the “Linked Device” section which we already covered when setting up your TV. Below it there is “Content & Setup”, which we will focus on in this section. After Content & Setup, there is the site-assignment card, followed by the Name card, and finally the Notes card where you can keep notes about this TV.

“Content & Setup” has two main parts, one is the “quick actions” section and then there is advanced configuration accessible by clicking on the gear icon on the top right hand side of the card

3- Let’s focus on the Quick Actions for now. Quick actions are shortcuts for modify some of the common TV settings including:

1. “Slides”: select whether to display your own slides on this TV or not, and if yes, which playlist to play on the TV
2. “News”: select whether to display our curated news items on this TV or not, and if yes, which categories of news to show (defaults to 100 news items)
3. “Weather”: select whether to display Time/Weather on this TV or not, and if yes, what layout and configuration for doing so
4. “Auto Advance”: whether to automatically advance the pages on the TV or not, and if yes, at what paste
5. “Audio”: whether to mute the EZ+ audio on this TV or not, which currently implies whether to mute your Video slides or not
6. “Logo”: whether to display the EZ+ logo on this TV or not, which translates to whether you want to use one of your Pro TV tokens on this device or not. If you do not have a Pro account, this action item will let you contact us in inquire about it.

4- Let’s look the advanced configuration options and see what can be controlled here. After clicking on the gear icon on top right corner of “Content & Setup” you will see the following groups of configurations:

• “Slides” group: has two card letting you control the playlist and also how your slides are mixed with the news items.

1. “Playlist”: This is similar the quick action for the Slides that we covered before. Here you can turn off showing any slides on this tv by selecting “No Playlist”, or pick the playlift you want to be played on this TV.
2. “Order of Slides”: Here you get to choose to whether shuffle the news and your slides, or have them displayed in-order. When the slides/news are displayed in-order, the “N” number controls how often you see your slides, with a higher N meaning that your slides will be shown in longer intervals. For example, every 2 slides means your slides are shown every other page, and every 4 slides means that there are three news items between your slides
   

• “News” group

1. “News Categories”: This is similar to the News quick action item where you get to pick the news categories you are interested in.
2. “Number of News Items”: This controls how many news items are shown on your TV and can be a number between 0 and 100. If you set this number to 0, no news items will be displayed on the TV. Also, when you toggle on the News quick action checkbox, we automatically set this number to 100 for you.
3. “News Text Visibility”: If you don’t want to see the title/summary of the news slides, you can set this to hidden. This creates a visually appealing and contextually relevant slides of images around the current news of the day

• “Location and Weather” group

1. “Location”: when location services are enabled on your Apple TV device that is linked to this TV, the location will show the approximate location of your device. You can set or overwrite the location of your device to get the correct date/time/weather-forecast at your TV. When you have not granted permission to EZ+ on your Apple TV to use the location service, or when you choose to disable our automatic location lookups through MDM profiles, you can use this configuration to set the location of your TV. Don’t forget to “confirm” the location you pick to apply your changes.
2. “Weather Layout”: This is similar to the Weather quick action checkbox where you get to set how you want time/weather to be displayed on your TVs. 
3. “Temperature Unit”: choose between Celsius and Fahrenheit to suit your needs.

• “Announcement” group

1. “Announcement”: You can enter a multi-line announcement that will be permanently displayed on this TV. This could be your Wi-Fi username/password. Delete the text to disable this feature.

• “General Settings” group

1. “Logo Visibility”: This is the same the Logo quick action checkbox. If you don’t have a Pro account, it will prompt you to contact us through email.
2. “Transition Effect”: This controls the transition effect between the slides when auto-advance is enabled. You can choose between the legacy “Slide” and our new “Fade in/out” and “Cut” transitions.
3. “TV Orientation”: This let’s you set the orientation of your TV. Note that Apple TV itself doesn’t support non-landscape orientations, so when you change the orientation here, if you are using the Apple TV’s remote to navigate the controls, you have to also rotate your Siri remote according to your TV orientation for the directional navigation to work fine. Doing so is not very intuitive but it will get the work done. Hopefully you don’t have to use the Siri remote much with our App in non-landscape orientation; and if you do so, you’ll get it once you practice a little. We have done our best to make this experience as smooth as possible.
4. “Keep TV On”: This allows you choose whether to keep the TV on (disable the built-in Apple screensaver) when EZ+ is running or allow the Apple TV to switch to the built-in screen saver after a certain amount of time. You should always select “Keep TV on” if you are using EZ+ as a digital signage and/or a supercharged screensaver!
5. “Per Slide Duration”: You can control the duration of the slides shown on this TV with this configuration card. Note that if you set the Duration of any slides in a Slide form to something other than Default, that duration will overwrite the TV-wide slide duration configuration set here.
6. “Audio Setting”: This is similar to the quick action Audio checkbox where you get to mute/unmute EZ+ on your Apple TV.
7. “Conference Room Mode”: When enabled, this will show a permanent message on top of your TVs with the name of the Apple TV box to help with airplay devices connecting to the TV. Note that the name of the Apple TV device set in the Apple TV itself will be shown on the message and not the name of the TV you have picked in the TV-form. 

Let’s now explore the Alert Feature and see how you can setup Automatically triggered alerts or trigger an alert manually.
First we will cover the manual triggering of alerts. You can trigger a manual alert either from the dashboard or the new Alert Management page in the Admin tab of the dashboard.

1- Navigate to the Dashboard tab of the management application and click on the red button at the lower right hand side of the screen which will take you to the Manual Alerts page

2- As an example, let’s trigger a Fire Alarm by selecting the Fire Alarm button. When you select a preset alert, a dialog box will ask you to confirm the alert and allows you to change the Target Audience of the alert. The Target Audience controls which TVs will be showing the triggered alarm. The options for the target audience are the “Whole Organization”, “My Sites”, “Pick a Site”, and “Pick Specific TV Groups”.
The “Whole Organization” option will display the alert on all the TVs in your organization, and is the default option. The “My Sites” option will display the alert on the TVs that are part of the Sites that you are a member of. The “Pick a Site” will let you pick site between the Sites that you have access to. And finally, “Pick a Specific TV Group” will let you pick among TV Groups that has been created by users.

3- When an alert is triggered, you will see an alert notification in your management app, as shown in 3.a, and if you click on the “Manage Alerts” button, you will be taken to the Alert Management page. In the Alert Management page, if you have the permission to clear the alert, you can choose to clear it by clicking on the alert and confirming the action. Note that the preset alerts will stay active until you manually clear them. As you will see later on, for manually configured alerts, or for automatically triggered alerts, you can choose to display an alert for a specific amount of time which will not require manual clearing.
Also, if you don’t get a notification on your management app in case of an active alert, you can press the reload button on bottom left hand side of the dashboard to reload all the data, which will also fetch any existing active alerts.

4- Now let’s look at creating a custom manual alert. Once you are in the Tigger Alert page, you can click on the “Create Custom Alert” button to broadcast a custom manual alert.
In the Tigger Manual Alert page, you can customize the text, the target audience, the audio, and the expiration strategy of the alert. You can also indicate whether the alert can be cleared manually and whether the Curators have permission to clear this alert instance. Once you are done configuring the alert, press Trigger Alert at the bottom of the page to broadcast the alert.

5- Now let’s look into creating automatically triggered alerts. First go to your Admin page, and then select the Alert Management page from the left navigation bar. This is where you can trigger a manual alert (in addition to the dashboard shortcut key), manage active alerts, and configure automatically triggered alerts. Let’s select “Add Configuration” from the Automatic Alerts section to set up our first automatically triggered alert.

6- In the automatic alert configuration form, let’s give our alert configuration a name and write down some notes about it. Then we’ll put our RSS/ATOM feed url in the alert source URL under Alert Sources. Here you can add multiple sources for the same alert configuration. Note that to make sure our configuration is correct, we should test (and potentially configure) the logic for each source by clicking on the “Configure Source” button, which we will cover later on; we highly encourage you to make sure the configuration for your alert is correct in order to prevent getting false alerts or missing important ones. Like the manual alert configuration form, you can select the TV groups for which you want to assign this alert to, select whether you want the alert to be audible or not (and pick an alarm audio for it), choose the expiration strategy for the alert once it’s triggered, and also control if the alert can be cleared or not (and whether Curators can clear the alerts or not).

7- Let’s look into testing and configuring an alert source. Our default configuration and parsing logic should work for most RSS/ATOM feeds, so there is a good chance that you don’t need to do much in this section. But to make sure of that, you should put either the alert source URL with an active alert item in the “Test Feed URL” or put a sample output of the feed in the “Sample Feed XML”  and press “Validate Logic”. If we can parse everything correctly, you will see a dialog box appear confirming title/description/id of the alert extracted from the feed. Figure 7.a shows such a scenario where the Sample Feed XML is automatically populated from the test feed url.
If the default configuration does not work for your feed, you can customize how the feed items are parsed and when an alert should be triggered from the feed . The default behaviour is that every active item of the feed is considered an active alert unless you change the “Trigger Configuration”, which has Trigger Element Path and Trigger Value parts. Lets cover this with an example.
Let’s say your RSS feed contains the following:

<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:atom=”http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom” xmlns:sy=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/”>
 <channel>
  <link>http://your_feed</link>
  ..
  <managingEditor>dpss-safety-security@your_feed (DPSS)</managingEditor>
  <webMaster>dpss-technology-management@your_feed (DPSS Technology Management)</webMaster>
  <item>
   <title>Emergency Alert Test Entry</title>
   <link>https://your_feed</link>
   <pubDate>Sat, Dec 14, 2024 14:48</pubDate>
   <description>This is a TEST entry for our Emergency Alert System. Please disregard.</description>
   <guid>123456789</guid>
   <alertlevel>1</alertlevel>
   <alerturi>https://your_feed</alerturi>
   <alerttype>4</alerttype>
  </item>
 </channel>
</rss>

If we set “Trigger Element Path” as “alertlevel” and “Trigger Value” as “1”, the above example will trigger an alert. But if we change the “Trigger Value” to “2”, the above example will not trigger an alert as its alertlevel is 1. Note that everything in the feed is considered to be a text/string.
Similarly, under “Advanced Settings”, you can configure the path to an element of the channel (which is typically “item” in RSS feeds), and for each element in the channel, you can specify the names for the title/description/publication-date/unique-id. If your alert feed does not have a unique id for each alert, don’t worry as EZTV will automatically create an ID for the alert based on its title/description. 

Also, when you change the Alert Feed type, we will automatically change the Advanced Settings of the parsing logic with default values for the given feed type.

Finally, don’t forget to save your changes after you are done with testing/configuring your alert source

Here’s a very old, and outdated, installation video that gives you an idea of how easy it is to install and use EZ Plus.
Do not use this video for setup purposes.