Uploads from contributors and partners

Simplified deliveries

You can now invite people outside your organization (production companies, photographers, agencies, or colleagues in another team) to upload content directly into your Screening Room, as well as Mediabank.

Inviting someone works the same way as adding any other user: you add their email, choose the user type contributor, and decide exactly what they get access to. One contributor might only reach Mediabank, another both Mediabank and Screening Room. They receive an email letting them know you've given them access, and from there they log in to a stripped-back view that shows only an upload window.

What they can upload to Screening Room:

• Video files
• Audio files
• PDFs and EPUB documents, which is useful if you're previewing an ebook or an audiobook. We treat those exactly like any other screener.

Uploading is deliberately simple: browse or drag’n’drop one or more files, click upload, done. Once something has been handed over, the uploader can't reach it again.

• What happens on your side: the file appears in your Screening Room and starts encoding. If you've chosen to be notified, you get an email once it's processed and ready,. Then you publish as usual. Similarly how SFTP uploads works, but way easier.
• Mediabank deliveries: Contributors can upload files as a new delivery or add more files to a previous delivery, with an optional message. If notifications are enabled, you’re notified when files arrive in your Mediabank inbox, ready to review and organise.

Note: You stay in full control throughout. You decide who gets invited, what each person can reach, and you can remove someone's access at any time.

Where to find it: Admin → Admin users → Add user → enter email, select user type, and choose access. Deliveries arrive in Dashboard → Mediabank inbox / Screening Room Inbox

What the contributor sees:

What you (admin) see:

Playback

Resume playback for video and audio

Journalists rarely get to watch a screener in one sitting. So we've added Resume watching.

If someone starts a screener and gets interrupted, we save their position. The next time they come back, the screener sits at the top of the list under Resume watching, and they're asked whether they'd like to continue where they left off or start from the beginning.

This matters most for long-form content and especially audio (video/audio files with a duration under 10 minutes are not included). Audiobooks can run for many hours, and finding your way back to the right spot used to be genuinely painful. One of our audiobook customers requested this for exactly that reason.

You can also surface this on your own pages. Two new components are available in Page Builder:

• Resume playback picks up the most recent thing a user started. You decide how long we hold on to that position, so you can set a window that suits your audience.
• Continue watching shows a list of the last videos a user started, so a journalist previewing six titles can keep track of all of them in one place. You decide how many titles to keep per user. Once a title is finished, it drops off the list automatically. We count the last fraction of the file as finished, so nobody has to sit through the end credits.

The progress bar uses your own brand color, so it fits straight into your Media Center.

Where to find it: Automatically at the top of your screener lists.

For pages: Page Builder → add component → Automatic Components → Resume playback or Continue watching

Cross-device playback handoff

Resume playback follows the user, not the device.

Start a screener on a laptop at the office, and it's waiting at the right position on a phone on the way home. The same goes for the portal. Wherever a journalist has access to your content, their position travels with them across every view.

Where to find it: Works automatically wherever playback happens: Media Center, your own pages, and the portal

SEO

Generate SEO titles and descriptions 

Until now, SEO metadata was set once for the whole Media Center. Individual posts and pages didn't have their own SEO title and description, which is exactly what search engines want to see.

Each post now has its own SEO section. You can write the title and description yourself, or click Generate and let AI write them based on the content of the post.

A couple of things we built into this deliberately:

• The generated text follows your tone of voice, rather than reading like a generic search copy.
• It differentiates between similar posts. If you publish ten posts about the same show, each one gets metadata that makes clear which post it is. Duplicate titles across seasons and episodes have been a real problem for search engines.
• This sits alongside a long list of under-the-hood improvements to how our customers' content is indexed.

Note: SEO metadata only does its job on content that's actually public. Unpublished or access-restricted posts won't be picked up by search engines, whatever metadata they carry.

Where to find it in POSTS: Media Center → Posts → open or create a post → SEO section → write your own, or click Generate

Where to find it PAGES: Media Center → Left menu, select Pages → open or create a page → Select tab 2.Settings → SEO section → write your own, or click Generate

SEO in Posts:

SEO in Pages:

Mediabank

Unzip here

Zip files are how a lot of material actually arrives, especially when a photographer or a production company sends over a shoot.

You've always been able to upload a zip file to Mediabank. Now you can unpack it where it sits. Click Unzip here on a zip file in a collection and the contents are extracted into that collection, however the archive is organized internally, nested subfolders and all.

We also check what you already have. If the archive contains files that are already in your Mediabank, they're deselected by default, so you don't end up with duplicates. If you want them anyway, just select them again before unzipping.

Note: The original zip file stays where it is. We don't delete it. And files are unpacked into the collection itself; we don't recreate the archive's folder structure.

Where to find it: Mediabank → open a collection → drag and drop / upload a zip file → Find the uploaded zip  → Three dots (settings) → Unzip here

Schedules

A new way to build a schedule (beta)

We've rebuilt how you plan a day, and it's available now as a beta alongside the existing edit mode.

Instead of creating each entry one at a time, setting the times, picking the program, defining the metadata, saving, and repeating, you work visually in the day itself:

• Mark the slot where you want a program to start, directly in the day view
• Search for the series, season, and episode and drop it in
• Flag it as a rerun, premiere, or live as usual
• Drag to adjust the start time, or to change how long it runs
• Append the next episode in a series with a single click
• Jump straight from an entry to its record in Program Catalog

We follow the correct broadcast day for the channel you've selected, rather than assuming midnight to midnight. A channel running six to six is planned the way its planners actually think about it. All the existing validations still apply, including warnings for gaps and overlaps.

It's already in daily use by sports planning teams, and the feedback has been that it's dramatically faster to work with. Available to everyone, including those of you who only occasionally need to make a change when your planners are unavailable.

Where to find it: Schedules → select a channel and a day → new edit mode (beta)

More upgrades across all modules

Drag and drop uploads, everywhere

You no longer need to find the upload button. Drag files straight into the module you're already working in and we'll take it from there.

This works in Screening Room, in Mediabank collections, in Program Catalog, and in related media on a post. Drop in a mixed batch and we identify each file type for you, so an image, an audio file, and a document each land where they belong.

Where to find it: Screening Room, Mediabank, Program Catalog, and related media → just drop your files in (nice.)

A statistics section for Media Center

Screening Room has had a dedicated statistics section for a while. Media Center hasn't. You could see the numbers for an individual post, but nothing above that. Now you can.

The new section gives you an overview across your content: views, recipients, and more, with sortable columns, a date range you define, and both posts and schedule changes included. Click into any individual item to open its own statistics page.

Where to find it: Media Center → Statistics

Cleaner media tabs in Program Catalog

Program Catalog used to spread media across as many as eight tabs, several of which held the same kind of file. Images and logos sat in separate places, and trailers, episodes, and clips each had their own tab even though they're all video.

We've merged them. There's now one tab per media type, with each file labeled underneath. Material coming in through your integrations is labeled automatically based on the naming conventions in the delivery, so a trailer still arrives flagged as a trailer.

Where to find it: Program Catalog → open a title, season, or episode → media tabs

Modernized notifications overview

The notifications overviews in both Media Center and Screening Room were plain lists. They now have search, status filters, and a date range you can define yourself, which makes it much easier to find a specific notification when you send a lot of them.

Where to find it: Media Center or Screening Room → Notifications

Enhancements

Consistent image metadata across the platform

We've aligned image metadata fields and their order (name, caption, description, copyright, photographer) across Admin, Media Center, Website, and everywhere else they appear. The same order is now preserved when you share an image from Mediabank into a post, so the information stays exactly where you expect it to be.

Skip forward in the player

By request: you can now skip ten seconds forward in the player, alongside the ten seconds back we added earlier.

Audit logging on screener encoding

Screener encodings now carry a record of actions, including when a file was created and transcoded. If there's ever a question about when content actually arrived, say a production company is certain they delivered two weeks ago, you can check for yourself. This covers files uploaded into drafts by a partner, too.

Where to find it: Screening Room → open a screener → Records of actions

One more thing we're working on

And that's all folks!

Quite a lot this time. As always, if you have questions about any of it, or want a hand getting started with contributor uploads, we're at support@clipsource.com.