Built for OEMs, integrators, and signage software vendors whose screens have to stay up: an OS that heals itself, can't be bricked by a bad update, and runs on the hardware you already make.
The crowd is all in the content layer: editors, playlists, dashboards. The operating system beneath it, the part that boots, renders, recovers and updates, gets treated as an afterthought. If you build signage, that leaves three bad options.
The open-source players go stale. Outdated images, dead community threads, mystery failures in the field. One integrator gave up and bought a commercial box instead.
The vendor-locked players are genuinely good, and genuinely locked. Buy their boxes or you don't get their OS. No licence to ship it elsewhere, no customisation, no say.
So most teams roll their own from a general-purpose OS, then maintain it alone, badly. A cost centre that was never your product in the first place.
We keep the OS modern, secure and patched: kernel, rendering stack, security fixes. Your engineers ship your product, not ours.
One operating system across the chipsets you already use. ARM-class today, more on request. Never tied to one vendor's boxes.
A UK team you can actually reach: security updates, fixes and custom features, shipped fast. A direct line to the people who build it.
Forthcast slots in underneath whatever you already ship, on whatever hardware you already make. A UK team keeps it modern, secure and maintained, and shapes it around what you need.
The content on screen is example signage — the layer keeping it alive is ours. Throw a real failure at the unit and watch what happens: frames freeze and screens reboot exactly as they would in the field, but the OS detects it, recovers it, and nobody gets called out.
Press a scenario below — the screen recovers itself, every time. The steps play out here.
A new chipset is a new module in the build, not a rewrite. Forthcast follows your hardware roadmap instead of locking you to one vendor's boxes.
Forthcast Systems is a UK company building one thing: the player OS that digital signage hardware should have shipped with. Fully maintained, and shaped around what each customer actually ships.
Tell us what you run today and we'll tell you whether Forthcast fits, and what it would take to port it to your chipset.