Initial Beta Release

Viewcastle is now available to try for select accounts starting with setting up video on-demand (beta)

We’re excited to roll out the first version of our beta software for certain customers to test. Our initial release contains the customer portal end of Viewcastle where admin users can login and start uploading on-demand content. Additionally, admin user’s can set up categories, create products, configure content “gates” (or paywalls), build catalogs, and lay out rows on their homepage.

Launched

• Customer Portal: Navigate to /vc-admin to sign into your backend portal where you will configure your OTT platform. Currently, navigating to / will reroute you to /vc-admin automatically, but in the future / will be where your frontend OTT web application will live for your audience to view your content.
• Video On-Demand: Navigate to Content -> Videos where you can add new pre-recorded videos. Chose whether to use categories for applying gates to your videos, or enable a gate directly on the video itself.
• Publish Content: You can schedule when your content will be made available to your audience by setting the Publish on, Expire on and Enable properties on any of your entries. Disabling an entry will effectively un-publish it, even if within the publish on and expire on dates.
• Feature Content: Marking a video as Featured will add it to the main carousel at the top of your homepage.
• Categories: Create categories to assign to your content. Categories make it easier to manage content, apply gates to content in bulk, and group content to be added to your catalogs.
• Catalogs: Setup your catalogs by adding one or more categories of content to pull in.
• Products: Create products in your Stripe portal and they will automatically sync into Viewcastle to be used when setting gates.
• Media Rows: Add media rows to your homepage by navigating to Layout -> Pages -> Home page. Choose the catalog you wish to populate your row, then drag and drop to change the order in which they display on your homepage.

Near-term

• BoxCast Integration for Live Events
• Manage Admin Users
• Your Personalized OTT Frontend
• Features of the OTT Frontend will be rolled out over time, but we will start by rolling out the homepage.
• Sub-Products: Add one or many sub-products under your recurring products if you want your recurring product to provide access to the same content as other products. For example:
• A Nature Pay-Per-View one-time product is setup to be $4.99 one-time to purchase and watch a nature video. You then set up a Nature+ recurring product for $4.99/mo and you want the subscription to give users access to all your nature videos including those that are pay-per-view. To do this, you would set Nature Pay-Per-View as a sub-product of Nature+.
• Automated Media Rows: Configure where certain automated rows will display on your OTT application, such as:
• “Recent”
• “Upcoming”
• “Keep Watching”
• “New”
• Channels: When using third-party integrations such as BoxCast, channels will help you map content coming from your integrations to categories that you have setup in Viewcastle.
• Custom Pages
• Menus: Define which custom pages to show in your web application’s header and which to show in a “More” menu.

Long-term

• Dashboard
• Advanced Filtering: Setup robust logic for determining what content to include in your catalogs.
• Notifications
• Video Series
• Analytics
• Native TV Apps
• Native Live Streaming
• Audio Content