If you wish to display a varied cycle of content throughout your signage network, the Distribute by Category Playback Order of a Playlist is just what you need.
There are in fact several advantages of publishing content as a Playlist over publishing content one by one to a Player. For example Playlists allow you better control of total playback duration, easily duplicating content to ensure a piece of content will be shown more often than others, and finally arranging the playback order of content evenly by Category with the Distribute by Category function.
Categories are available for Campaigns, Playlists, individual files, Apps, Compositions, and even Data Feeds. You find them under the "Properties" setting of each content.
Add Category
Create several Categories to distinguish your content according to their purposes. Create entertainment, news, or advertising Categories, for instance. Let's add a Category to our content.
- Look up your content. Click on the three dots on the thumbnail and choose the “Edit Properties” option. Campaigns and Playlists even have a Category box in their editors.
- Write a new category in the Category text box and hit the Enter key or click on Add Item. If your Category was already created in the past, you can select it from the drop down menu.
- Confirm the changes with the orange Save button.
We will create two Categories, one called entertainment and one called news. The entertainment Category will be added to the Aquarium.jpg image and the news Category will be added to the City lights.jpg.
Distribute by Category
Now that we have added Categories to our content items, we will distribute the order of a Playlist by Categories.
- In your OnSign TV account, select an existing Playlist or create a new Playlist.
- Add as much content as you want to the Playlist Content box. At this point, the order does not matter. Note that how many times each Category was used is shown at the top of the Playlist Content box. We add our two images twice. This way we have the entertainment category twice as well as the news category twice.
- Once you have inserted all content you want into the Playlist look at the Playback Order. The default option will always be Manual. Select the option “Distributed by Category” instead.
- This will change the order of the items in your Playlist. To undo it you will need to manually reorganize the Content in your Playlist. Therefore another dialog window will prompt your confirmation.
- Now all content is neatly ordered without any item from the same Category directly following one another in the loop.
- From now on, each time you drag a new item into the loop, it will be arranged evenly in keeping with the distribution.
- When you modify the playlist content order, the "Distributed by Category" option will be disabled, but the current playback order will be kept. In case you want the next items added to also be distributed evenly according to their Category, enable the option again.
- Save the Playlist and publish it to a Player.
Important: After publishing the Playlist, its playback order won’t be modified if you change a content item’s category. The previous order will be maintained until you edit the Playlist after the Category modification.
The Distributed by Category Playback Order is a neat way to displays balanced content without overwhelming your audience with a single content category, whether its all ads or all news.