I know it's been a while since I've updated on anything here regarding any of my ongoing projects...
Well...
Binge-watching a TV series has become a pretty popular thing, and I've certainly done it myself. The sense of the "episodic" nature of a lot of (especially older) TV shows is kind of lost, though, when I binge them. I started really noticing it, strangely enough, watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I found I enjoyed it more watching one episode, going away and doing something else, then coming back and watching another episode, maybe a few days or weeks later.
RMVOD has finally made some progress. One new feature that I've been ruminating about for a while was doing something akin to what you might see on a broadcast TV station in the 80s or 90s... a scheduling block of syndicated TV shows. Typically a TV station would buy the rights to a TV show, and just play one episode a day, or one day a week, rifling through the episodes in whatever order the distributor provided them in. Granted, some gave it more thought than that, but... They would have a block of shows for mid-morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, evening, and so on. Weekday and and weekend schedules.
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| TV Series Play Lists in RMVOD |
So, what I'm working on is something similar for RMVOD. It's a playlist of TV Series, not individual movies or episodes. When you initiate playback of a "Syndication Play List", the UI calls the API to request a list of the episodes to play. The server looks through you watch history to see the most recently watched episode in each series, and picks the next one. Of course, not all series have the same number of episodes. There's an option in the Play List to specify whether a Series should loop back around to the beginning when it runs out of episodes. If a Series runs out of episodes, and the Series restart flag is not set, then the series is skipped. There is another option on the Play List which permits the programming block to keep looping until you manually stop it.
Right now, the only thing that's working is the basic Play List interpretation and episode selection on the server, and playback in the web client. The storage of Play Lists in the database is solved, however, currently the Play Lists offered to the user are hard-coded in the web client. Display and selection of a playlist in the web client is minimally solved, but creation, editing and deletion/deactivation of Play Lists is still to be developed.
So, it's a baby feature, but just testing it out, I've really enjoyed the "one episode at a time for each series" thing... and as I get used to the patterns of the playlists (show A, then show B, then show C) I suspect it will be more enjoyable and relaxing. Maybe this is just a me thing, but I find it more enjoyable than binging for a lot of shows... maybe most of them.
One thing I've also been thinking of as a stretch goal for this playlist feature is a "movie of the week" sort of function. Basically, create a special kind of artifact (an new "Major Type", maybe) which picks out a movie that meets certain user-definable criteria, and hasn't been watched in some period of time (90 days, maybe), and inserts that into the artifact list.
Anyway, that's what's been going on at RIBBBITn3rding. If you're curious, you can check out the code for RMVOD here: https://github.com/taobear68/rmvod (it's Open Source)
