Content Presentation

Your feature carousel is the headline act of your service. It’s where you showcase your most popular or latest titles or your promo content. Full control of the lineup is in your hands – whether by setting up a rule for full automation of this featured content or implementing it manually – the choice is yours.

Feature carousels can be placed on any page, however, the most popular choice is at the top of the homepage. Media Manager makes it simple to control your feature carousel with an easy-to-use interface.

Viewers need categories and hierarchies to find the content they’re looking for. Simplestream can support multiple different content categories and hierarchies by tagging your VOD assets. Highly responsive category management in Media Manager allows you to execute asset category reassignment in real-time, for instant cross-platform deployment.

You can create as many as three levels to a category hierarchy, dependent on the volume of content you have and there is no limit to the number of individual hierarchies. The presentation of your content is totally customisable.

Separate your content by genre to make it simple for your viewers to find the programmes they’re in the mood for, whether it’s comedy, horror, documentaries, or reality.

If you’re using licensed content you can categorise it by theatre or production company. You can also do this by channel, so viewers can easily find their favourite items.  

The simple category tagging system can also power Syndication. Categories can be used to define which platforms, playlists and syndication services your content is surfaced on.

How do you group content that belongs together before it’s ingested into Media Manager? The answer is: perfect metadata.

To ensure all your VOD assets are presented correctly, we ensure that your metadata is is detailed enough and correctly formatted. Simplestream works with customers to ensure that series content can be automatically collapsed into the relevant boxset. Saving you time and money through efficient and automated workflows.

Key to the presentation of your content are playlists, and there are numerous types Simplestream provide depending on your specification.

Playlists are how your VOD assets are presented on the homepage of your applications. From movies to landscape format, we’ve got you covered. Need channel logos overlayed, need series titles or catchup data – all configurable options.

How to populate playlists?

Manual playlists are driven by you, by physically selecting the relevant VOD assets. You decide what goes into each playlist and the order. These options are great for content teams and editors to use for trending content, breaking news or highly curated content groupings.  

Dynamic playlists are a more automated solution. They are controlled by a rule which you can set and then forget. Go from 0 – 100 with automation to run your homepage. Whether you would like a regular expression to set your categories, inclusions and exclusions, or ordering options, it’s possible to automate this with Media Manager.

A region is a customisable grouping of countries within Media Manager, allowing you to segment your content into core regions rather than by individual countries.

You can choose which regions get access to your content, for example, you could have ‘region 1’ set up as the UK and USA, rather than having to include each individual country code for the countries within those territories, you select ‘region 1’ when surfacing that content. Keeping your service compliant with content rights has never been more efficient.

Simplestream groups countries into regions, including by language, making it simple to present content in the correct format to your audience. Media Manager works on the basis of metadata, ‘allow’ list for regions, making it simple to serve content to the correct regions and ensuring that our system won’t present content that isn’t included in this list.

How do your viewers find content within your applications? Your search function should be intuitive, reactive and simple, to make it easy for your viewers to find what they’re looking for.

Simplestream utilises an API-based search which is fully customisable, so you can select what metadata should be included within the search index. Beyond how the content is found, is how it’s then presented in the search results. You retain control of the presentation, including how search results are grouped and ordered.