Contributors credits and catalogue improvements

We’ve promoted Contributors and their Credits into first class citizens within Mediagenix On-Demand; this increases efficiency, allows you to store rich Metadata for Contributors, enables better Catalogue management, and provides new presentation options for the platforms you deliver your content to.

Please note that the new Contributor and Credits features are only available if they’ve been enabled for your Company in Mediagenix On-Demand, but the Catalogue improvements are available to all.

This note describes what has changed in full, and as usual you can contact support or your technical account manager for further clarification.

Contributors, Credits, and Catalogue improvements

Contributors and Credits

Prior to these changes the contributors (e.g. actors and directors) for Features etc. could only be stored as Metadata Attributes. Whilst this approach works well, it does have limitations that the new Contributor and Credit features overcome. As a part of Mediagenix On-Demand and Sequence’s excellent adventure, Contributors can now be created directly in the Catalogue and then added as Credits to: Brands, Collections, Series, Episodes, and Features. Yes way!

Please note that these features are only available if they’ve been enabled for your Company in Mediagenix On-Demand; contact your Technical Account Manager to do this.

In Mediagenix On-Demand a Contributor has several attributes: first name, last name, external ID, biography, portrait image, and tags.

When a Contributor is added as a Credit to content you can specify their Job and, where appropriate, their Character Name. Here’s a bodacious example of a Contributor and their Credits:

The Credits are shown in a sortable table, and to complement the Contributor’s portrait image there’s an Images section for additional images. The values for Job (e.g Actor, Director, Writer) are defined based on your requirements, and the Character Name attribute can be enabled for any Job where it’s required.

Credits are added to content by searching for a Contributor, or to Contributors by searching for content.

When editing the Credits for content, if the Contributor being added does not exist you can create them at that point; you can also create new Contributors from the Catalogue page.

Here you can see that Keanu Reeves does not yet exist as a Contributor, but can be added in a single step:

It’s often important to correctly rank the Contributors for content; here are the Credits for a Feature:

To change the ranking of each Contributor simply click the Edit button for the Credits and then drag the Contributors into the correct order.

Catalogue improvements

In the Catalogue page we’ve added Brands (YAY!) and Contributors (if that feature is enabled for your Company in Mediagenix On-Demand) to the Type filter, and the omnipresent Search Catalogue field now lets you restrict your search to Collections, Features, Series, and Contributors:

If you search for All types then the search results are grouped by content type (with a maximum of six results per type) and you can then click through to all of the results for a specific content type:

And, finally if you filter the Catalogue for Brands and then click the View in schedule page icon for a Brand then you’ll be able to see all Schedule Entries for all Series in the Brand. Nifty!

One more thing! Very soon we’ll be releasing the API support for Contributors and Credits so that your various robots and minions can join in the fun too! Details to follow…

Reference

• movida#3565 Enhance Contributor support
• movida#3752 Contributors
• movida#3978 Add an External ID for Contributors