Digital Content availability control by TIME (not just days)

I'm still in test mode with before we go on sale with anything - we had holding slides in the content before it went up for other free events. Don't suppose it accepts decimal values? e.g 0.0104 = 15 minutes. Sorry I can't be of more help. 

Hi Christian and Louise,

I am the Business Analyst for the Consumer-Facing Products team, it is great to hear about both of you getting started with our virtual experiences! Christian, you notice correctly that the X days before and X days after setting does work only with integer-based days, and not times. I would be interested to hear if any other members have found any creative solutions to meet the 10 minutes before use case.

However, one way that you could accomplish this would be to manually change the Digital Content Available property for the Event/Item Product from Not available to Always available at 10 minutes before the event. One word of caution though, just as with a big on-sale event, if you are expecting a large number of viewers for an event, we always recommend a few items:

• Ask your patrons to log in early for the event
• Consider a virtual waiting room to manage traffic on your TNEW servers

Let us know how your event planning and implementation go, I am always excited to see this feature in use.

Thanks,

Paul

Hi Christian and Louise,

I am the Business Analyst for the Consumer-Facing Products team, it is great to hear about both of you getting started with our virtual experiences! Christian, you notice correctly that the X days before and X days after setting does work only with integer-based days, and not times. I would be interested to hear if any other members have found any creative solutions to meet the 10 minutes before use case.

However, one way that you could accomplish this would be to manually change the Digital Content Available property for the Event/Item Product from Not available to Always available at 10 minutes before the event. One word of caution though, just as with a big on-sale event, if you are expecting a large number of viewers for an event, we always recommend a few items:

• Ask your patrons to log in early for the event
• Consider a virtual waiting room to manage traffic on your TNEW servers

Let us know how your event planning and implementation go, I am always excited to see this feature in use.

Thanks,

Paul

Thank you Paul Kappel and Louise! After figuring out that we were limited to days and not specific times, what my team ultimately decided is that we want our digital content pages to be available well in advance of the performance, and we will rely on our video provider's (Vimeo) option to have a holding slide (as Louise suggested) that says when the event will go live. This will likely be our business practice going forward in any case. While I do think it might be a useful feature to control availability down to an exact time of day, it turns out we are not likely to need that feature in the foreseeable future.

I would also say that having an option for start and end dates AND times seems like it would be useful.

This is what we are doing.  Our digital content has a premiere date, where the content is streamed "live" with a comment stream, followed by a period of video-on-demand (set by our contract with the artist) following.  Our practice is to use Vimeo to control what content is actually available in the embed (holding slide, preview, countdown timer, live-stream or VOD).  We then use the performance date to denote the premiere date and then after the premiere will shift the date to be the last day of VOD availability.  As a result, we'll be using a maximal number of "days before" as our control.

One thing that bothers me is that if you are logged in and don't have access to an event, if you go to the specific content page you do not get a message about it being unavailable (ideally with a link to purchase), but instead are (lied to and) told that no such page exists.

That sounds good. When initially speccing out a customization to do digital gatekeeping (before the feature was launched) I specifically wanted to be able to create a set of availability date ranges for each page and then display different content based on which range you were currently in.

I'll go ahead and say that date-controlled content generally is a major missing feature for us since moving from a custom site to TNEW.  The worst is at season launch when we have to rush through scores of events and performances updating things.

I think what you're doing is very similar to what we are. This week is our first attempt, so it's still in flux a bit. Your description is helpful, thank you!

That is odd behavior for when you are logged in but don't have an admission to the event. So, for example, I could certainly imagine someone sending the digital content display page URL to a friend who hasn't bought it yet, and they'd be prompted to log in, but then there's not a purchase link? They just get a 404?

EDIT: I just tested and that is indeed what happens. Not ideal.

Next week is our first event.  We've done some "digital dress rehearsals" with the staff to walk through potential issues, but you know how first night goes...

That is exactly what would happen.

This is concerning to us because we would like to provide lots of links directly in to the content pages from multiple locations.  Here's why:

1. Navigating to Digital Content is hard.  You need to log in, find your account page (many people may not know that the email address in the top bar is their link to their account, much less what that means), then find the digital content page (you can make every page except the digital content page the default account landing page.  That's a bug currently being looked at) then find the order your content was purchased in (which I think is counter intuitive, and the sort order of newest order first is likely backwards to the way our customers will be using it), then find the actual performance (which is sorted in reverse chronological order from within the order).
2. We are concerned that people are going to come in to the TNEW site and try to find their event in the event listing (why wouldn't you?), then be confused because they will receive no message there about whether or not they have purchased the event.  We'd wanted to include links to the content on the item pages, but hesitate to do so because of this issue.
3. TNEW logs users out after 30 minutes of "inactivity" (i.e. not clicking around), which will happen to every user during the course of watching their digital content. It won't kick them out of the content page, but we are concerned about people accidentally clicking away in the middle of the performance, then struggling to re-login and find their way back.

I have enhancement requests in on all of the above.  I'm not aware of any licensee actually have a paid event having begun in TNEW yet (we know of one group using it, but I believe the events are actually free), so it's going to be a big learning curve for everyone I think.

Hi Gawain and Christian,

First of all, thank you both for the feedback and suggestions for improvement as you are working towards your first digital event. I do know that some members have held a digital event on TNEW already and so far the experience has been a positive one for the patron, but I do think it was successful due to the messaging they incorporated both on their main website and TNEW in order to optimize the user experience.

For instance, putting a banner / content on the home page of your website that provides users a both a link to buy a "ticket" to the event and a link to the digital content page for the event that is about to start. For those patrons who have already purchased a ticket, the link they click onis a link to the log in page that includes a redirect URL to the individual content page, logs in and is immediately redirected to the page for the event itself (bypassing the digital content landing page in the account section).

The defect you reference regarding not being able to default the account landing page to the digital content listing page will be fixed in our upcoming 7.39.0 release. I know you reported that early on Gawain, so thank you for that. 

Regarding event listing or displaying event on TNEW listing page / calendar beyond the actual live premiere date, we have gotten quite a bit of feedback on that as well and will follow up with the community once we do a bit more analysis on that. We have also received feedback in that the lack of displaying different content based on date ranges, it also isn't easy to edit content for an event that's now in the past. Definitely this use case is something we need to revisit.  

You both also raised issue with the digital content page for the event not accessible to a user and they receive the "page not found error" - I see your point. I'll take this feedback back to the team for us to review. 

We haven't yet heard issues with the 30 minutes of inactivity affecting a patrons experience but, as you said, this is early days yet and so we would absolutely love it if you could send us any feedback of a real-world event not just from a configuration standpoint but from a user experience standpoint so we can better understand that types of issues or successes you and your patrons are having with the virtual experience. 

Gawain & Christian - when are your upcoming first digital events? Paul and I are trying to attend as many of these as we can in order to experience the events first hand as an end-user. Thanks! Keep the suggestions coming.