How to Display Exchange Rates on a TV Screen (No Special Hardware)

Walk past any busy exchange office and the first thing you notice is the rate board: a screen behind the counter showing today’s buy and sell prices. Customers glance at it before they ever reach the till, and it quietly answers the question every walk-in has — what will I get for my money?

If your shop still runs on a whiteboard or a printed sheet taped to the glass, here’s the part most owners don’t realize: you don’t need special signage hardware to fix that. A rate board is just a webpage shown fullscreen on a TV, and you almost certainly own everything required already. This guide walks through the whole setup, start to finish, in about 15 minutes.

Step 1: What you need

The full shopping list is short:

• A TV with a web browser — most smart TVs sold in the last decade have one built in — or any computer or streaming device with a browser that you can plug into the TV’s HDMI port. An old laptop gathering dust in a drawer is perfect.
• A webpage with your rates embedded on it. Steps 2 and 3 cover this — it takes a few minutes and no real coding.
• An internet connection where the TV sits. Wi-Fi is fine.
• About 15 minutes.

That’s it. There’s no app to install, because there is no app — the board is a plain webpage, and that’s the whole point: any screen that can open a webpage can become your rate board. If there’s already a TV on the wall playing a channel nobody watches, it’s about to earn its keep.

Step 2: Set up your rates

First, your rates need to live somewhere you can edit them. This guide uses Exchange Rate Management, which is built for exactly this job: create a free account, open the dashboard, and enter the buy and sell rate for each currency you trade.

Two things worth knowing before you start. The rates are yours, set manually — this is not a market data feed. You type the buy and sell prices you actually offer, margins included, and those exact numbers are what customers see on the screen. And the free plan covers USD and EUR pairs, free forever, which is enough to build and test this entire TV setup end to end. When you want your full currency list on the board, Pro unlocks all 153 currencies for $9.99/month or $99.99/year, and you can cancel anytime from the dashboard.

Step 3: Put the widget on a page

Your dashboard gives you a one-line embed snippet. Paste it into the HTML of any page on your website — using your own API key — and the widget renders your rate table right there:

<script src="https://exchangerate.management/exchange-rates-embed.js" data-api-key="erm_..."></script>

It works anywhere you can add an HTML or script block — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, or a hand-written HTML file.

Here’s the trick for the TV: the page doesn’t need to be part of your public site at all. Create a blank, unlisted page — something like yoursite.com/board — with nothing on it except the snippet. Don’t link it from your menu; no visitor needs to find it. Its only job is to be the address your TV opens. If your rates already appear on your homepage you can point the TV at that instead, but a dedicated blank page keeps the screen clean: no header, no footer, just rates.

Step 4: Open the page on your TV

Now get that page onto the big screen. There are three common ways to do it, and they all end in the same place: a browser, fullscreen, pointed at your rates page.

If you have the choice, take the laptop or mini PC route. TV browsers work, but a desktop browser is faster, easier to control, and gives you the kiosk options in the next step.

Step 5: Make it stay on screen

A rate board that reverts to a screensaver after ten minutes isn’t a rate board. Three settings turn a browser tab into a display that stays put:

• Go fullscreen. On a keyboard, F11 puts the browser into fullscreen and hides everything but your rates. TV browsers usually have a fullscreen option in their menu. On a desktop browser you can go one better and launch in kiosk mode, which starts fullscreen with no toolbars at all.
• Disable sleep and screensavers. Turn off the screensaver and sleep timer on whatever is driving the screen, and check the TV itself for eco or auto-off timers — many TVs switch themselves off after a few hours of “inactivity,” and a rate board is exactly the kind of thing they consider inactive.
• Set the page as the browser’s homepage. Power cuts happen; so do cleaners unplugging things. If the rates page is the homepage, recovery is: turn it on, open the browser, done. Anyone in the shop can do it without instructions.

Do those three once and the screen becomes furniture — it simply runs.

Step 6: Updating rates day to day

This is where the setup pays for itself every morning. When your rates change, you don’t touch the TV. Open the dashboard from any device with a browser — your phone at the counter, a laptop in the back office — change the numbers, and save. Every screen showing the widget follows within minutes, because the widget refreshes itself every few minutes.

The same dashboard drives every embed you have, so the TV behind the counter and the currency rate board on your website always show the same numbers. One place to edit, no whiteboard that disagrees with your homepage, no one phoning the shop to ask what today’s rate is.

The honest limitations

This setup has real limits, and it’s better to know them upfront. It needs a browser running on the screen: if your TV is an older model without one and you have no spare computer, plan on spending $30–50 on a streaming stick that has a browser — that’s the entire hardware budget. It needs an internet connection, because the board is a live webpage; there’s no offline mode. And it’s software on a general-purpose screen, not sealed signage hardware — if someone switches the TV input or closes the browser, the rates disappear until the page is reopened, which is why the homepage trick in step 5 matters.

If you want a dedicated, purpose-built unit with none of those caveats, that’s what LED currency boards are — typically several hundred to a few thousand dollars, plus installation. We’ve written an honest digital rate board vs LED display comparison if you’re weighing the two. For most single-location exchange offices, the TV already on the wall does the job.

That’s the whole project: rates in a dashboard, a widget on a blank page, that page fullscreen on your TV. About 15 minutes, most of it spent typing in your currency list — and tomorrow morning, updating the board will take less time than finding the whiteboard marker ever did.