Playlists and Playlist Sharing in Omny Studio

Omny Studio is not just a podcast host — we offer so much more than that. One of the features that makes Omny’s hosting ‘enterprise-level’ is our flexibility within playlisting. In this blog we’ll explain playlists and dive into some examples of cross-program playlist sharing and the powerful enterprise podcast workflows that are available to all publishers using Omny Studio.

What are playlists?

If you don’t already know (and if you do it’s fine to skip ahead) a playlist in Omny is basically a podcast in any other podcast host. A playlist represents an RSS feed; its name, description, and artwork, which gets displayed on podcast apps. And it’s at the playlist level that distribution of the RSS feed to podcast apps is controlled.

 

Omny has a level above playlists called programs, to allow a podcast to have multiple RSS feeds — so you can create curated lists of episodes within the program. This is rare and why Omny Studio is one of the only podcasts hosts with a capability like this.

But needing more than one RSS feed for a podcast is much less rare for radio shows that are being made available on demand, and that’s one of the use cases broken down below, along with powerful, novel workflows that podcast publishers can utilize. If you have further questions about playlists, and this help doc doesn’t answer them, please just drop us a line!

What is cross-program playlist sharing?

To take this idea of curated selections of one show to the next level, we also give publishers the ability to share clips or episodes from one playlist to another across different programs — this means that you can do all sorts of things, without having to upload episodes multiple times.

This can be done through a simple setup where all the episodes from one playlist can be added to another.

 

Or through ‘auto-add’ rules, so that clips are automatically shared from one playlist to another when they match criteria.

 

To learn more about opting a program into this kind of sharing, you can see this guide.

Playlist sharing examples

Let’s get into some practical examples.

Windowed release (drop to podcast apps at different times)

First, create an auto-add rule on your public playlist to automatically add any clip with ‘public’ visibility. Then; your clips marked as Unlisted can be added to a playlist that you can distribute to only certain podcast apps. Schedule the same clip to be public when you want it to be widely available on all podcast apps.

Once the clip goes from unlisted to public at the scheduled time, it will be added to the public playlist and also remain in the first playlist.

Automatically add national news episodes to regional news feeds

This could be done by a simple ‘add all clips’ rule.

Why? So national news items only have to be uploaded to one program, and then automatically shared from there, without having to be uploaded to each and every regional news feed.

This saves producers time for some of the largest radio broadcasters who are doing this right now with Omny Studio. This means that a subscriber of a local news program is getting the local news clips as added by a producer at the local station, plus all their national news items loaded in through Omny automation, making a happy listener, and producer.

Setup a tag-based rule, so that any clip with a particular tag is automatically added to a master playlist

Your producers could tag episodes with ‘bestof’ if it’s worthy for the ‘best of’ playlist for example. This is easily done as part of episode publishing.

 

Why have a ‘best of’ feed? Well, some publishers offer this curated feed to patrons/supporters/members. Another reason being these shared episodes download from the original programs, so analytics aren’t split off into another place. This leaves less of a reason not to offer a feed that collects ‘only the best’, so listeners can be exposed to more content from more shows, and they can then go deeper into those that appeal to them.

Feed drop

The pinnacle of cross-promotion — don’t just tease another show, drop in a whole episode so the audience of Show A can see if Show B is for them. But, what if Show B doesn’t want those sweet downloads to show up on Show A, and not count to them? I mean… ‘we made that!’ after all.

A cross-program sharing rule for that specific episode title will add the clip to another RSS feed, but downloads will be counted towards the clip in the original program, keeping everyone happy.

 

Configure a ‘custom-field’ based auto-add rule

For a sports network, producers could select from a dropdown of teams that the episode relates to before publishing a clip. Then the clips will be automatically added to that team’s special playlist that spans content across multiple programs and hosts. Great for the die-hard fans, for next to no extra work for your producers. Huzzah!

 

Of course, that example is applicable to more than sports networks! Pop culture, politics, cooking (curated playlists by ingredients!?).

Wrapping up

Cross-program playlist sharing is a Swiss Army-level tool, and if you’re a publisher with a novel twist on your feed curation or a podcast network with a great use in mind (our current favorite is automatically creating playlists for your frequent guests) then you’re able to get started with this straight away.

Cross-program playlist sharing is available to every Omny Studio publisher!

If reading this blog has you fired up, then we’ve done our job. Go out and surprise and delight your podcast listeners with feeds full of just what they wanted.

To discuss how cross-program playlist sharing, or any of Omny’s enterprise podcasting features, could work for you, please reach out to us!

Happy podcasting!