Important: Release 5.0 goes live for TSS Compose, TSS Play and TSS Control at the same time, during your organisation's release weekend. The first organisations move over in the weekend of 9 October; we'll let you know when it's your turn.

Meet the new Composer

The Composer has a new, calmer layout: your scenes on the left, your tools at the top and the settings of what you select on the right.

A fixed property panel on the right shows the settings of whatever you select: the transition, background and layers of a scene, or the settings of an asset.
Scene navigation has moved to the left. Right-click a scene to copy, duplicate, save or delete it, or to set it as the screensaver.
Media, Text and Triggers sit in the top bar. Media opens the media library on top of your canvas, so you can drag files straight onto your scene.

Read more: The Composer at a glance · The property panel

Introducing Screen Overlay and Screen Backdrop

Add your logo, footer or background music once per screen. It stays on every scene and keeps playing while the scenes change.

Screen Overlay sits in front of all scenes on a screen; Screen Backdrop sits behind them.
Change it once, and it changes on every scene of that screen.
It keeps playing: video and sound on it play straight through scene changes and transitions, ideal for an ambient soundtrack or a looping background.

In the Composer, open Screen options (⋯) next to a screen to add one.

Read more: Screen Overlay and Screen Backdrop

Build with fewer clicks

Triggers and on-click actions are simpler to set up, and you can handle many items at once.

Simpler triggers and on-click actions

Triggers and on-click actions now work the same way: choose what should happen, then pick the targets on any screen and in any scene. Each action shows as a clear summary card.

Read more: Adding on-click actions · Adding triggers

Select multiple items and act once

Select several stories, media files or users and handle them in one go: duplicate, move, publish or delete. In the Composer, give several scenes the same background or transition at once.

Smaller improvements

Replace media swaps an image or video for another file, keeping its position and size in your layout.
Sortable lists: click a column header to sort stories, scenes, media, backgrounds and Story Management.

See exactly what you'll get

The same text engine in Compose and on screen, new fonts and real scene thumbnails.

The same text everywhere: TSS Play renders text with the same engine as Compose, so alignment, spacing, wrapping and line height match what you see while building.
Set the line height of a text asset, and choose from all the weights and styles of a font.
New fonts for everyone: Barlow, Bitter, Caveat, DM Sans, Lato, Lora, Noto Sans, Noto Sans JP (Japanese), Noto Serif, Nunito, Open Sans, Oswald, Poppins, Quicksand, Roboto Condensed, Source Sans Pro and Space Grotesk.
Real scene thumbnails: they show what's really in a scene, including text and overlays. You see them in the Composer, on the Stories page, in Story Management, in your saved scenes and in TSS Control.

Read more: Adding text · Working with scenes

Fine-tune the visitor experience

Small settings that make a big difference for the people in front of your screens.

New playback settings

Hide when finished: a video fades out when it ends, so the story carries on without it.
Resume story after screensaver: each screen returns to the scene where it was, instead of starting again.
Zoom level for web pages: pages are shown at the zoom you set, and keep it through scene changes, the screensaver and restarts.

Read more: Setting up a screensaver · The property panel

Touch and web pages

Touch feedback: text and images with an on-click action dim slightly while someone presses them, so visitors can see their tap registered.
Pinch to zoom: visitors can zoom in and use other multi-touch gestures on web pages they can't move around.

Read more: On-screen asset interaction

Present from a phone

TSS Control now also works on a mobile phone that's connected to the same AV network as your TSS Control tablet. Use it as a clicker to move through your story, or to find and start a story.

Simple next and previous buttons: on a phone, two simple buttons take you to the next or previous scene of your story.
List or tiles: switch the story overview between a list and tiles, whichever suits the phone or tablet.

Gateway SDK

Your own systems can now control TSS players through the TSS Gateway. Start and stop stories, change scenes, show, hide or play assets, and fire story triggers from a show controller, a sensor or your own app. The player reports back what it did, and you can ask it what's running, so your system always knows the state of the room.

C# SDK: building in C#? The SDK takes care of the connection and messaging for you.
Any other language: connect with a standard RabbitMQ client. Every request, event and message is documented.
Postman collection: try requests against a player before you write any code.
Remote gateway: run your integration off-site instead of on the AV network, if your setup includes a remote gateway.

Read more: Getting started · C# SDK

Good to know

Two touch features are now off by default: the click sound on every tap, and enlarging an asset with a long press. If you'd like either back, contact TSC Support and we'll turn it on for your setup.
More reliable, with many small fixes: uploading media and getting stories onto your screens both work more reliably, and we fixed a range of smaller issues in TSS Compose, TSS Play and TSS Control.
Also live on your screens now: if your setups didn't have the new TSS Play yet, you also get everything described in TSS Release 4 - Play & Control. That includes the Release 4.2 features: per-asset audio levels, on-click actions on screensavers and automatic media processing. See TSS Release 4.2 - Compose.

New to the Composer? Start with Your first story.