An idea, a sample screen and no software
Community Reach Media Network, in Broward County, Florida, gives preschools a lobby TV for free. Local businesses pay for short sponsor slots between the school's own news. Before this project the company had the idea, a sample design for the screen and a player for its slides. It had no way to give each school a screen of its own, and no way to stay in control of what every screen showed.
What we built
A screen for every school. A full HD lobby screen with six to eight cards that page through on their own: the menu, the calendar, reminders, photos, and a clock in the school's time zone with live weather from the US National Weather Service.
Updates from a phone. School staff change their screen from a dashboard made for phones, with nine colour themes, five font styles and four screen layouts to choose from.
Community Reach stays in control. An admin portal covers every school and user, with network-wide messages and a word filter. A QR code goes on screen only after Community Reach approves the link, and every scan is counted. One switch takes a single school, or the whole network, off air.
Screens that report in. Health checks watch every screen and send an email alert when one stops checking in.
Safe sign-in. Two-step sign-in, required for admins, plus a check against passwords known from data breaches.
The screens play inside Yodeck, the player Community Reach already used, so sponsor slides and school screens share one playlist.
How it is built
Next.js 16 with React 19, TypeScript and Tailwind, on PostgreSQL 18 with row-level security and Drizzle ORM. Better Auth runs sign-in, Resend sends the email, and a self-hosted check keeps bots off the forms. The TV screen itself is plain JavaScript, built for the older browsers inside TV players. It all runs in Docker behind Cloudflare, with nightly backups to Cloudflare R2, and more than 800 automated tests check it.
The result
The platform reached production on 5 November 2026, three weeks after the first commit, with Community Reach signing off each of the three phases along the way. A load test with 1,000 screens sent nearly 15,000 requests, and none failed. The network is ready for its first schools.
