When a customer searches on your OTT Site via the search bar in the top navigation, our system will look through all of your active Videos and Collections, leveraging all of the metadata that has been supplied for each item to determine the most relevant match. The search bar will expose results as the customer types, and yields results regardless of capitalization. The results will display any applicable collections first, followed by videos.
It’s important to use clear titles and descriptions for all of your content — this is by far the most effective way for your customers to surface your content, but additional benefits come from supplying additive metadata (read here about adding metadata to collections, and here about adding metadata to videos).
When a customer searches your site, your Videos and any Collections you’ve created that are a part of an active subscription will be leveraged against the Title, Description, Short Description, Genres, Cast, Crew, and Tags that you have supplied. Other metadata fields will appear on your Video and Collection pages to assist your customers in discovering new content, but the fields listed above are the ones specifically used for search results.
If a video is included in a TVOD product but not included in any SVOD products, it will not surface in search.
Search results do not differ across platforms.
Removing content from search results
If you have content that you do not want to appear in search, it’s important to remember to set that content as Unavailable. While a video that is not part of a Collection is not discoverable by your customers by simply clicking around, if the Video is part of a “Plan,” it will be included in search results.
To remove a Video from search results:
- Go to your Content tab and then edit the video you’d like to remove
- Go to the Distribution tab in the left side bar
- Scroll down to the Plans section
- Uncheck all plans
- Save your changes
Metadata and collections
Metadata can be added in the Discovery tab of your Collection, and includes:
- Tags: Ad hoc hashtags that describe your content. These will be used to help your customers discover your content. They are not shown to the customer by default (though they can be turned on in the Site Settings). In the image below, we added the “outdoors” tag to the playlist, only to have it surface in search for the customer searching for the term “outdoors”:
- A Media ID: This is an internal identifier that can be leveraged for searching your own catalog or for generating reports with our API. This is internal only, and doesn’t affect your viewer’s search results.
There are also several fields of API-specific metadata. Learn more about those in this article.
Metadata and videos
You can also add standard metadata to your videos (e.g. genre, release date, director, ratings, etc.) so that your customers can easily discover related content they might enjoy. Adding metadata to videos also allows you to make it easier for viewers to find your content via search or other parameters. Read all about adding video metadata in this article. It’s also possible to bulk update your metadata; this article will walk you through the steps of doing so.