New broadcast playlist feature in Backstage helps 24i’s streaming customers promote content that’s “On Now” or “Starting Soon” to improve content discovery

We’re always making tweaks to 24i Mod Studio, our video streaming platform, to bring our customers features that help them make the most of their video content. In this blog post, our Head of Product Management, Florian Laroye, looks at the latest smart way to curate videos with our Backstage content management interface: Broadcast Playlists.

‍Launching your own streaming app is a great way for companies with linear or FAST channels to build a direct relationship with their viewers. With our end-to-end Broadcaster Studio solutions, it’s easy for them to go OTT with personalized apps on multiple consumer devices with a combination of live and VOD content. 

‍Upgrade your linear and FAST content discovery

Alongside a full Electronic Program Guide (EPG), there’s now a new way for our broadcaster customers to drive discovery of the great content on their live and FAST channels: Broadcast playlists. 

‍Playlists are the almost infinitely flexible mechanism that our Backstage content management system uses to define which content should appear in a specific row on your app. It’s easy to do: 

1. Set the rules for your playlist - I’ll come back to that in a moment. 
2. Associate that playlist with a new or existing row on a given page.
3. Confirm how you want the row to be displayed (landscape or portrait images, normal size or bigger “highlighted” images, etc.). 
4. Save your changes and Backstage applies them to your apps in real time.  

Introducing a new way to curate video content for streaming

Up till now, we’ve had two types of playlists that our customers can use to create attractive content collections: 

• Static Playlists - where you manually add individual content items to the playlist and decide the order in which they should be displayed (unless you’re applying 24iQ personalization to determine the order based on the end user’s preferences). 
• Dynamic Playlists - where you select from a large range of variables (genre, title, actor, age rating, year of release, and many more) and let Backstage dynamically pull all the matching content into your row.

So what’s different with the new kid on the block? Broadcast playlists allow you to define rules based on start times such as “in the next hour” or “in the next 10 minutes.” The criteria can be mixed and matched with other rules such as genre, so you can build thematic rows using the EPG metadata associated with the shows in your channels. Backstage then pulls in every piece of content from across your channels that matches the criteria you’ve defined.

For an app that features lots of FAST channels, it’s a great way to surface and showcase all the cooking shows or news programs from across different channels that are about to start, helping viewers to find something they want to watch. Broadcast Playlists are also a way to create user urgency as they take your time-sensitive content from linear channels and highlight it to viewers separately from your library of VOD or catch-up content.

Here are some images that show the process of configuring a broadcast playlist in Backstage:

Available now and ready to use

Broadcast Playlists are live in Backstage now and we’re excited to see what our customers do with this latest feature. 

If you’d like to see more of what Backstage can do for you, including the Broadcaster Playlist feature, watch our video demonstrations here: 

Watch a video demo

And if you’d like to talk to our expert team about how Backstage can help you make the most of your video content, why not arrange a meeting?