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New Weather and Activities Screens, Now on the Screensaver Too

BetterSTR TV has two brand new full-screen pages: a proper weather forecast and a local activities guide guests can book from with their phone. Both can now show up in the screensaver between your photos, so the TV is useful even when nobody is watching it.

Most of the time a TV in a holiday rental is switched on but nobody is really watching it. Guests are unpacking, cooking, getting ready to go out. On BetterSTR TV that is when the screensaver runs, and until now it was a photo frame: your property, your town, your specials.

The two questions guests ask most in that time are "what's the weather doing?" and "what should we do today?". So we rebuilt the Weather and Activities screens from scratch, and made both of them something the screensaver can show between photos.

The new Weather screen

BetterSTR TV weather screen: current temperature, next 24 hours as a curve, a 7-day forecast with temperature ranges, wind, humidity, UV, sunrise, sunset and rain
Current conditions, the next 24 hours and the week ahead, readable from the couch

Everything a guest wants before deciding between the beach and the museum, on one screen:

  • Right now: temperature, conditions, feels like, and today's high and low, with the local time and date for the property.
  • The next 24 hours as a simple curve with an icon for each couple of hours, so "will it rain this afternoon?" is answered at a glance.
  • A 7-day forecast with temperature range bars and the chance of rain each day.
  • The details: wind and gusts, humidity, UV index, sunrise, sunset and rain today.
  • °C or °F, switchable on the TV with the remote.

Day and night follow the property's real sunrise and sunset, so the screen shows a moon after dark, not a sun.

The new Activities screen

BetterSTR TV activities screen: a featured tour with photo backdrop, rating, duration, free cancellation and price, a large scan-to-book QR code, and a row of local tours below
Local tours with ratings, prices and a QR code to book on the phone

Activities shows the top-rated tours and experiences near your property. Each one fills the screen with a photo, its rating and number of reviews, how long it takes, whether it has free cancellation, and the price in the property's own currency. Guests scroll through them with the arrows on the remote.

Nobody wants to type a booking into a TV, so they don't. Each tour has one big QR code: scan it and the booking page opens on the guest's phone, ready to pick a date and pay.

If you'd rather keep it simple, there is also a Basic list layout, and on Premium you can switch Activities off completely for a TV. Both are under Advanced settings → General when you edit the TV.

Both on the screensaver

This is the part we are most pleased with. Weather and Activities are now slides in the screensaver, mixed in with your photos. By default they appear after the third and sixth photo, and you can drag them anywhere in the slide list or switch either off.

  • A guest walks past and sees tomorrow is 25° and sunny, or a sunset cruise ten minutes away.
  • They press OK and the full screen opens. On an activity slide it opens on the tour that was showing.
  • On Activities, ◀ and ▶ step to the previous or next tour without leaving the slide.
  • Any other key, or any key over a photo, closes the screensaver as before.

Fast on small boxes

Both screens are built into the app rather than loaded as web pages. In our tests on a 2GB box the Activities screen used around half the memory of the old one, and on a 1GB HDMI stick the screensaver, weather and activities slides included, stays smooth with plenty of memory to spare. If you have a cheaper box that used to struggle with the screensaver, update to BetterSTR TV 1.0.202 and it shouldn't any more.

Both screens are fully translated into every TV language, including Arabic and Hebrew right to left, and follow the language the guest picks on the home screen.

Turning it on

  1. Make sure the TV is on 1.0.202 or newer. Boxes update themselves, or open Google Play and update BetterSTR TV.
  2. Open Android TV in your dashboard and edit the TV.
  3. In the screensaver slide list, check Weather and Activities are switched on (they are by default) and drag them where you want them.

To set this once for every TV, use Screensavers in the Android TV actions. A TV with its own slide list keeps it.

What it costs

Nothing extra. On the Free plan both slides are already switched on, in our default screensaver. Premium, from US$3 a screen a month, lets you use your own photos and move or switch off the Weather and Activities slides.

Already on BetterSTR TV? Open Android TV in your dashboard and check your screensaver slides. New here? See what BetterSTR TV does, or create a free account → and install the app from the Play Store on a TV you already own.