The power of smart lists and dynamic content

Vimond Media Solutions
May 25, 2022
The power of smart lists and dynamic content

In the fast-paced world of streaming where it seems like content is changing continuously, keeping on top of what's new and what your viewers want to watch is an important yet challenging task. Consider the following scenario: 

You, as a content rights-holder have added a lot of new content in your catalogue that you want to promote in a carousel on your front end. This is most likely segmented by metadata such as genre, series and other  relevant metadata. 

Without the assistance of automation, an editor would have to manually add the new content in the right category and catalogue.  Or even worse, you need a developer to update the service and ensure content is populating to the correct category within your service. 

Introducing smart lists

With Vimond Smart lists, the process of promoting content is simplified. Vimond Smart list incorporates the pre-defined filters as well as the metadata held on your assets to automatically promote the content accordingly. If you need to tweak filters it can be easily done while curating the content using the form configured in the Smart list definition. This means that creating lists with content such as "recently added", "popular in your area" or "movies you might like" is easy and efficient thanks to automation.

Why use a smart list?


Previously, development teams would be required to code against Vimond APIs to enable lists of content such as a “Recently Added”. This was a time-consuming process that also required technical resources. 

We now set up this out-of-the-box, which saves our users time and money in implementation and testing. 

Smart lists can also now be fully integrated into external (Customer) data sources. Many more dynamic and automatically created content carousels can be produced with simple searches of data and content tags. As a result, a significant increase in power and flexibility has been handed to editorial teams and the money and time that would have been spent by customers creating these experiences in viewer facing applications can now be funnelled into content budgets or other innovations. 

How?


When publishing content to an end-user service, lists or content panels are dynamically populated based on the smart list engine. The smart list engine can generate requests to a specified API where the filtering parameters are based on forms created from a documented markup.

The form can be built up based on several elements. These include text boxes, selections, sliders, and so on, where you can specify whether a field is required and set default values.

Form preview in Smart engine settings

Fields in requests and replies can be mapped between our CMS, Vimond VIA, and any API using json format, this is performed only once while configuring the Smart list engine. 

Vimond VIA's smart list initially includes pre-integrated dynamic lists, so starting up with content lists is easy and efficient.

When using our Content Discovery service the query is automatically resolved and the response is paginated according to requirements to avoid waiting for a lot of data to be returned in one big response.

Benefits 

  • Reusable smart list definitions that can be reused in several lists but with different arguments 
  • Well documented UI components that can be used to create advanced forms for editorial usage.
  • Can be integrated with 3rd party API’s like recommendation systems.
  • When using it with Vimond’s Content Discovery service responses are automatically resolved and paginated reducing the number of network requests needed for end-user portal integration.

Using Smart list in curation

Result in the end-user portal

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