Hardware behaves differently from servers: it lives in a space nobody watches, it is wired to a monitor that may or may not agree with it, and it is physically reachable by whoever walks past. These are the checks worth building into how you run screens.
Lock the resolution, do not inherit it
When a monitor sleeps, is switched off at the wall, or reboots, the video handshake starts over. A player that simply follows whatever the monitor reports can come back at a resolution nobody chose, and a layout designed for one panel arrives cropped on the next.
Decide the output resolution, verify what the screen actually receives after a restart, and keep an emulator or a fixed output setting in the path if the display is prone to changing its mind.
Do not rely on default OS updaters
An update prompt in the middle of a trading day is an outage with a countdown on it. Update screen hardware in a window you choose: deliberately, on a schedule, with somebody available if the device does not come back.
Give the box a quiet restart window
Unattended media boxes accumulate the usual drift — memory pressure, a driver that stops responding — and most of it clears after a clean restart. Without one, the first restart is the one somebody has to drive out and do.
Schedule a restart in a quiet hour, check that the screen comes back to the right playlist, and treat a device that needs an unexpected restart as something to investigate rather than routine.