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The Playlist Program Model for Online Broadcasting

 by Rick Hendershot, Linknet Creative Resource Library

In this segment I discuss The Playlist Program model as an alternative way of structuring your online steaming content.

In its simplest form the playlist program involves stringing a number of pre-recorded items together in a list. When a viewer clicks on a link pointing to the list, the "program" -- the series of items -- plays in sequence in his or her media player.

For example, consider a nightly newscast. It begins with a standard Opener, followed by Item 1, Item 2, Item 3, etc. and then a standard Closer. The whole program might be 15 or 30 minutes long, and when finished could just start playing again at the beginning.

Or imagine putting together a series of short restaurant "reviews" -- in effect, ads -- which advertisers pay for on the presumption that each of the reviews will get roughly the same number of views or listens. You want them to be short enough that viewers will watch more than one segment, and you want them to be strung together so that the same review is not always at the beginning of the program. In other words, you want to achieve a kind of randomized viewing effect.

You can accomplish this randomized end result in different ways. First, you could create a looping play list with the same sequence that just keeps playing over and over -- whether someone is watching it or not. A particular viewer clicks on the link and sees the program already in progress. Presumably the number of views of the various segments will be more or less equal because people will be clicking into the program at different points.

Alternatively you could create a program with a randomly changing play list which only begins playing when someone asks for it. Or third, you could combine the first two -- by having a play list that changes randomly AND loops at the same time.

The playlist structure has some obvious advantages. Perhaps most important, it gives you a simple tool for developing richer, more varied programs. Creating a program can be done incrementally, segment by segment. This makes it much easier to change the program -- you can change all the segments, just one of them, or simply shuffle the order around. But equally important, it allows you to integrate advertising with your programming in interesting, effective, and relatively non-intrusive ways.

Advertising Opportunities

From the advertising point of view, the advantage of the playlist is that it provides you with an effective and quite acceptable way to break out of the one-view-per-click mindset that is so characteristic of the way the entire "traditional" web experience has been structured. Content programmers and advertisers are often hamstrung by this structure because each page, image, or advertisement presented to the viewer must be initiated by the viewer herself. Unlike with traditional media, there is no easy, non-intrusive way to "push" advertising to viewers, listeners, or readers.

Yes, there are exceptions, and they provide an interesting contrast to playlist advertising. The most obvious and annoying is the Popup Ad. These things jump out at you uninvited and usually unwelcome. They are like spam. Which is exactly why they are more objectionable than typical television, radio, or newspaper ads. Generally you can ignore TV, radio, or print ads without too much effort. Or where you can't easily ignore them -- especially, I would think, in the case of radio ads -- we tend to excuse their presence as necessary to making the rest of the broadcast possible. But popup ads have none of these redeeming features. They are unwelcome, unexpected, intrusive and ultimately doomed as an acceptable advertising medium.

But ads inserted in a playlist along with other content are much more akin to television ads. When properly presented they can be seen as legitimate and necessary parts of the program, and even welcome, often informative, breaks in the heavier action.

That should be enough to suggest how playlists can be used to produce commercially viable programming. As far as I know the only ones doing this are -- you guessed it -- the national broadcasters with things like news, sports and weather. Only time will tell whether this model can be used by smaller webcasters.

In my article called "Alternative Models -- the Video Magazine", I suggest an approach where these "smaller webcasters" might take advantage of things like playlist programming to create a viable service. The core of this model is a program or series of programs structured on the playlist model, which are in turn embedded within a larger "magazine" context where a number of other things are going on to attract a wider range of visitors. This model is applicable to virtually any subject matter which can be "thematicized" -- turned into a theme around which the site can be built.

Such a concept has much in common with the now widely popular specialty cable channels, each focused on one narrowly defined area of interest -- e.g., The Cooking Channel, The Golf Channel, The Home Renovation Channel, The Health Channel. The Video Magazine concept shares this focus on a central theme, but adds an important element of interactivity that is simply not possible on traditional broadcast media -- no matter how specialized it is. Interactivity is, after all, the essence of the world wide web, and it is entirely appropriate that our concepts for streaming content take full advantage of that unique character.

Rick Hendershot is the publisher of The Linknet Marketing Resource Library, and has been dabbling in online video and audio for a number of years.

The Linknet Network is a library of resource materials spread across more than 20 websites and a number of blogs. You can place your link text on 15 pages spread out over at least 15 different sites for one small annual fee. Sites that focus on Trade Show and Event Marketing include Vinyl Banners from America-Banners.com, Vinyl Banners from Banners-Canada.com, Low Cost PopUp Displays, Trade Show and Display Graphics.