Show promos and teasers
farski opened this issue · comments
Is the idea behind this some kind of tag to indicate that this particular episode is a promo or teaser? Assuming some kind of unique id space adopted for shows, a lovely tag would indicate this AND reference the show being plugged. pipe dreams...
@azpeters These would be promos for the feed's show. eg the Dog Talk feed would include a promo for Dog Talk. By definition of being a promo these would not be episodes, so they probably can't exist as item elements in the feed.
Cross-promotions are also something work discussing, but that's probably different ticket.
I think it's a largely aesthetic decision to decide whether to have promos and episodes both be items, but have differentiating attributes, or to have promos exist outside of items. Both would equivalently facilitate clients treating them differently. Even within a show you'll have promos that might be promoting different seasons or arcs within a show, so having a way to not only flag that this item is a promotion but also tie it to what it is promoting would be useful (where "it" can be the show itself, a season, a specific episode etc). Agree that cross promotions are a bit different, and are also tied to the whole network/ownership idea. Gimlet cross promotes its new shows on its existing shows often.
Adding promos as items means all existing code/apps would treat them as episodes. Presumably if people start adding promos to existing feeds they won't want current subscribers to see them as new episodes just because some app isn't aware of a new attribute, so I think this is actually a matter of behavior and functionality, not just aesthetics.
Just seeing how they're used, I imagine podcasters would probably want promos at both the <channel> and <item> level.
@CharlesWiltgen #5 covers episode-level promos
If you are using Blubrry PowerPress, we allow for something like this already by utilizing the iTunes:order tag. If you are not familiar, the itunes:order tag is used to set the order of how your episodes appear in the iTunes directory. This allows a podcaster to "feature" an episode at the very top while listing all of the other episodes as normal. Though our featured episode option only does 1 episode, one can easily expand on this and allow a podcast to feature as many episode as they want at the top.
With that knowledge, a tag that simply highlights the episode in some way as being special would serve the purpose of highlighting it in a special way by a podcast directory. This special marking does not have to be limited to "promo" or "teaser". The imagination could never end on this one. I for example could see "preview" as one of the special highlight types.
I would propose a <namespace:highlight>VALUE</namespace:highlight> tag with the value being one of a list that we come up with starting with options: promo, teaser, featured, preview