This article covers how to use BLOX VMS to publish content to “Over-the-top” (OTT) apps, such as AppleTV, Roku, Amazon FireTV, and others.
On Demand Video
If your OTT/CTV apps are managed by BLOX Digital, please see our complete documentation.
If your apps are managed elsewhere, there are a couple direct-from-BLOX VMS methods to get videos into OTT:
MRSS feeds
Publishing videos to OTT is achieved with our built-in Smart Playlist functionality. Through just picking categories and/or adding keywords, you can syndicate a video in just seconds. Each Smart Playlist automatically creates an MRSS feed that can be used by your OTT apps to display content.
First, decide what category or keyword (or both) you want to use to syndicate your content. For example, a video about your local high school football team might have a Category of “Sports” and a keyword of “highschoolfootball”.
Set the criteria for the playlist to match that category and/or keyword (you can set up a playlist to use Categories or Keywords or both.) Any videos that match your Category and/or Keyword criteria will populate. You can also set how many videos you’d like, up to 100 (the example below only has one matching item).
Save your playlist.
When you’ve done that, open your playlist. Copy the “Feed” button at top right.
This copies a link to the MRSS feed for the playlist. You can drop this into a browser to view the content the feed currently contains (Firefox and Internet Explorer will display it in a reader-friendly format, while Chrome will display it as XML). Send this feed to your OTT app developers to add to your OTT platforms.
Tip: One method of easily tracking in BLOX VMS which playlists are used as OTT channels is to add tag “ott” to each playlist. You don’t have to tag your videos with this keyword (the Smart Playlist keyword criteria is an OR search, not an AND search), but by adding this tag to your Smart Playlist, you can search against your playlists in the Media tab and show just your OTT playlists.
Direct Integrations
OTT app providers can use the BLOX VMS API and BLOX VMS Integrations Guidelines documentation to get videos information into the apps.
Livestreaming
If you are livestreaming with BLOX VMS and wish to publish your stream in one or more OTT apps, please contact our support team to provide/verify the stream URLs you need for your various OTT platforms. In most cases, the same stream going out on your website/mobile apps works in OTT as well.