Playlists
A playlist is the order things play in. It is the simplest idea in the product and the one people over-think.
Why it existsA screen needs to know what comes next. That is the whole job. A playlist is deliberately not clever — it has no rules, no conditions and no priorities — because everything conditional belongs in a schedule, where you can see it. Two simple things you can reason about beat one clever thing you cannot.
Building one#
1Whose library you are choosing from, if you manage several.
2The order it plays in, top to bottom, then round again. Drag to reorder.
3Only Active files appear here.
- One item is a valid playlist. A single menu image that never changes is exactly what a playlist is for.
- The same file can appear twice. Put a key message at positions 1 and 4 and it plays twice as often. That is the only weighting mechanism, and it is enough.
- The total length is shown as you build. A forty-second loop that includes an ad slot means a passer-by sees the ad roughly every forty seconds — worth knowing before you sell it.
Note
Changing a playlist changes it everywhere it is used, immediately. Screens pick the change up at the end of their current loop rather than cutting mid-item, so nobody sees a half-played video.
Example — Selling a fifth of your loop
A five-item loop where item 3 is an ad slot gives an advertiser 20% of your screen time. Add a second slot at position 5 and you have sold 40%. The loop length tells you what you are selling far more honestly than a percentage does.
Watching it before a screen does#
Preview on any playlist opens it playing, in the browser. It is the player itself running the same loop a television would — not a mock-up of one — so an HTML5 file that misbehaves misbehaves here, and a video that will not decode fails here first.
1The loop, item by item, sized against the whole. The line shows where it has got to.
2Sound starts off. Turn it on to check a soundtrack or a video with speech.
- Nothing is counted. No play is recorded, so a creative you watch twenty times while checking it does not appear in its own numbers.
- No advertiser is charged. An ad slot is drawn as a labelled placeholder for its own length rather than auctioned, so the loop runs to the right duration and nobody pays for an impression nobody saw. A VAST tag is the same.
- Sound starts off. A preview opened in an office should not begin playing music. Unmute when you want to hear it — a playlist of audio shows its tracks as a list, since there is nothing to look at.
- It stops after half an hour. Left open on a spare monitor it would loop for days; it pauses instead, and resumes on a click.
Example — Checking a supplier's HTML5 banner
An agency sends a zip. Upload it, put it in a playlist of its own, press Preview. If the fonts are missing or it reaches out to a server it cannot see from a shop, you find out at your desk instead of on a wall in Manchester.