sanaa media

Inspiration

Across East Africa, thousands of businesses already have televisions and smart screens in their restaurants, hotels, salons, hospitals, schools, gyms, shops, and waiting areas.

However, most of these screens are only used to show television channels. At the same time, businesses continue spending money printing menus, posters, banners, price lists, and promotional materials that quickly become outdated.

Changing a price, introducing a new service, announcing an event, or promoting a special offer often means designing and printing everything again.

We saw an opportunity to turn screens businesses already own into powerful marketing and communication tools.

That inspired us to build Sanaa Media Box: an affordable smart media device designed for African businesses that combines digital signage, live media, business promotions, and remote screen management in one simple platform.

Our goal is to give every business—from a small restaurant in Kampala to a hotel chain operating across East Africa—the ability to control its screens as easily as posting a WhatsApp status.

What it does

Sanaa Media Box turns an ordinary television or smart screen into a remotely controlled digital signage and media system.

A business connects the media box to its screen, signs into the Sanaa Media platform, and manages everything from a phone or laptop.

Businesses can:

• Create digital menus, price lists, promotions, announcements, and branded displays.
• Choose from ready-made templates designed for restaurants, hotels, salons, schools, hospitals, shops, gyms, events, and other industries.
• Edit text, prices, images, colours, and offers in seconds.
• Publish content instantly to one screen, an entire branch, or screens across multiple locations.
• Schedule adverts and announcements to appear at specific times.
• Display tickers, lower thirds, QR codes, promotional overlays, and squeeze-back advertisements.
• Continue showing live television or other media while displaying the venue’s own promotions.
• Update menus and prices without printing new posters or boards.
• Control multiple branches from one business dashboard.
• Create zonal campaigns that can be published to selected screens or locations.

The platform allows businesses to use their screens for both entertainment and marketing. A restaurant, for example, can show a live football match while promoting meals, upcoming events, delivery services, loyalty cards, or special offers around the broadcast.

Sanaa Media Box transforms a passive screen into an active business asset.

How we built it

We built Sanaa Media Box as a connected hardware and software platform.

The system includes:

• An Android-based media box that connects to televisions through HDMI.
• A custom Sanaa launcher designed to give businesses a simple, controlled screen experience.
• A Sanaa Media television application for playing media and displaying scheduled business content.
• A Laravel-powered administration and business management platform.
• A responsive web dashboard that businesses can access from phones or computers.
• A template engine for digital menus, adverts, tickers, lower thirds, announcements, and squeeze-back promotions.
• A scheduling system for publishing content at selected times and across selected screens.
• Multi-screen and multi-branch management.
• Remote content synchronisation between the business dashboard and connected media boxes.
• Device health, internet connectivity, and screen-status monitoring.
• Support for business branding, images, prices, QR codes, and promotional campaigns.

We designed the platform to work in environments where internet speed and reliability may vary. Templates and scheduled content can be cached on the device so that screens continue displaying business content even during temporary internet interruptions.

We also built the platform with the wider Sanaa ecosystem in mind. In the future, products and promotions from Soko24, Sanaa Cards, Sanaa Finance, and other business services can be published directly to authorised screens.

Codex helped us inspect the existing architecture, improve the Android and Laravel components, organise implementation tasks, detect integration issues, generate tests, and accelerate development across the media box, dashboard, and screen applications.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was making the experience simple for business owners while managing a technically complex system behind the scenes.

The platform has to coordinate hardware devices, televisions, internet connections, user accounts, templates, schedules, media playback, and remote content publishing.

We also encountered challenges with lower-cost Android hardware. Some devices advertise high specifications but perform inconsistently under continuous media playback. This required us to optimise memory usage, reduce unnecessary background processes, improve caching, and test different device configurations.

Another challenge was supporting businesses with unreliable internet connections. The system cannot depend on a permanent high-speed connection, so we designed content to be downloaded, cached, and played locally whenever possible.

Creating flexible templates was also challenging. A restaurant menu, hospital announcement, school notice, hotel promotion, and salon price list all require different layouts. We needed a template system that remains easy for ordinary users while still producing professional results.

We also had to solve multi-branch publishing. A business owner may want to update one screen, one branch, a group of branches, or every location. The platform therefore needed clear device grouping, scheduling, permissions, and publishing controls.

Finally, we had to ensure that the product remained affordable for East African businesses. The solution needed to deliver measurable value without requiring expensive screens, specialised installations, or complicated technical training.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Sanaa Media Box is no longer only an idea.

We have built a working media-box prototype, a business control platform, an Android television application, advertising templates, scheduling tools, and remote publishing functionality.

We have successfully demonstrated that a business can:

• Connect the media box to an existing television.
• Manage the screen remotely.
• Create and update promotional content.
• Schedule advertisements.
• Display branded overlays alongside media.
• Manage multiple screens from one account.
• Change what customers see without visiting the physical screen.

We are particularly proud of the squeeze-back advertising capability. Instead of completely interrupting what viewers are watching, the system can temporarily resize the media and create branded advertising space around it. This allows venues to continue entertaining customers while communicating offers and announcements.

We are also proud that the platform is being built from East Africa for East African businesses. It addresses local realities such as printing costs, changing prices, limited marketing budgets, inconsistent connectivity, multi-branch operations, and the need for affordable business technology.

Most importantly, we are building something that can help a small business use the same kind of screen-management technology normally available to large companies.

What we learned

We learned that digital signage is not primarily about displaying attractive graphics. It is about helping businesses communicate faster, reduce repeated costs, and make better use of assets they already own.

We also learned that simplicity is one of the hardest technical problems.

Business owners should not need to understand devices, media formats, screen resolutions, servers, or content synchronisation. They should only need to select a template, change the message, and press publish.

We learned that reliable offline behaviour is essential. A system designed for East Africa must expect internet interruptions and continue operating gracefully.

We also learned that affordable hardware requires careful optimisation. Software must be efficient enough to run reliably for long hours without overheating, slowing down, or crashing.

Another important lesson was that different businesses need different levels of control. A single restaurant may only need one screen, while a hotel, hospital, school, supermarket, or franchise may need central control over dozens of screens.

This led us to design Sanaa Media as a platform rather than a single-purpose signage application.

What's next for Sanaa Media

Our next step is to move from the working prototype into a polished, commercially deployable product for businesses across Uganda and East Africa.

We plan to:

• Improve the custom Sanaa launcher and automatic startup experience.
• Expand the professional template library for different industries.
• Introduce AI-assisted template creation and content generation.
• Allow businesses to describe a promotion and automatically generate a complete screen campaign.
• Add a mobile application for faster publishing and screen management.
• Improve remote device monitoring, diagnostics, and software updates.
• Expand multi-branch and franchise management.
• Add audience-aware scheduling based on venue type, location, and time of day.
• Integrate Soko24 products, restaurant menus, services, and promotions.
• Introduce loyalty cards, QR campaigns, and customer engagement tools through Sanaa Cards.
• Build a controlled advertising marketplace where businesses can choose whether to display approved local campaigns.
• Develop custom Sanaa Media hardware optimised for continuous playback and remote management.
• Support more countries, currencies, languages, and locally relevant templates across East Africa.

Our long-term vision is to build the operating system for business screens in Africa.

We want any business to connect a Sanaa Media Box, sign in, and immediately transform its existing screen into a live menu, advertising channel, information board, entertainment system, and customer communication platform.

Sanaa Media Box turns every screen into a business opportunity—controlled in seconds from anywhere.

Built With

• firebase
• flutter
• golang
• laravel
• mysql