Hey there! Am I missing something obvious? We were hoping to set availability of a digital content page to begin 10 minutes prior to the live stream of the performance. This allows us to show the "content unavailable" message until just before start time, and also not have to edit the digital content display page manually at the performance start time to embed the video, In other words, we want to have the content page ready to go ahead of time, but not become available until just before the performance. Like opening the house shortly before curtain.
With the X days before, X days after setting for availability, I mistakenly thought we could choose a start date/time and end date/time, but I see now that it really is just DAYS.
Is there a way to do what I'm saying?
Sorry for my hastily composed posts today, I'm under the gun.
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:
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.