Get started with Playouts

The Blue Billywig video player is fully customizable, with the ability to use your company colours and logos. The player appearance and behaviour can be configured in the “Playout” menu. In this article you will learn the basics of playouts.

1.0 | What is a playout?

The playout settings determine how to the player looks and behaves as your are presenting your content to your audience. The Online Video Platform (OVP) allows you to create as many playouts as you like to fully cater your video and audio presentation in different contexts to various audiences.

Let’s look at a few examples:

1.1 | Example: news article playout

A big broadcaster wants to present video content in as many news articles as possible. They have created one playout for all their news articles that is set to have the broadcaster’s branding colours as well as a small logo in the upper right corner of the player.

As soon as a viewer clicks the play button, the preroll ad that is configured on the playout will show first. When the main video content starts, the viewer is able to select subtitles in the control bar as well as a different video quality. In this particular case, the player also enables viewers to share the news article by email or by Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter post.

As the video ends, related videos are presented to the viewer in the end screen.

1.2 | Example: Interactive onboarding playout

A big retailer has created an interactive video that gives a virtual tour through the company warehouse. The video is displayed in an app that is only accessible to employees. In the playout settings a logo is displayed, but the control bar remains hidden as all the relevant interface options are included in the interactive video itself. Furthermore, the playout is set to autoplay as soon as the app has loaded the player and it’s set to fixed dimensions so that the video can be properly displayed in portrait mode.

1.3 | Example: “sticky” player with a playlist

A popular gaming website wants to show the gameplay of each video game they review. In each blog post the player is placed below the article introduction. As the visitor scrolls down, the ‘regular’ display of the video turns into a ‘sticky’ player that stays in the bottom right corner of the browser screen. The floating player remains in that position unless the visitor scrolls back to the original position of the player or when they click the fullscreen button.

Additionally, a playlist is configured in the playout setting. As soon as the embedded media clip ends, media clips from the playlist are served in the player.

2.0 | Create / edit a playout

• Go to the Media Library in the left sidebar
• Click “Playouts”
• Select an existing playout (e.g. the “default” playout) or create a new one:

• When creating a new playout, enter a title. The title of the playout will not be visible to viewers, but we recommend using a descriptive name. If the number of playouts increases overtime, they will be easier to manage.

The options that follow after the title field are part of the Appearance settings. To learn more about changing the player’s appearance and behavior, visit our articles about all the specific playout settings:

• Player Appearance
• Player Control Bar
• Player Start / Pause / End Screens
• Player Sharing Options
• Player Behaviour
• Player Fitmode
• Player Autoplay and Browser Behaviour

3.0 | Active vs Inactive playouts

In the playout settings, use the toggle in the upper right corner to make a playout ‘active’ or ‘inactive’.

The ‘active’ / ‘inactive’ toggle determines if a playout can be selected when generating an embed code for media clips projects or channels (learn more about embedding content).

Active playouts can be selected for embedding content, while inactive playouts cannot.