Lightcast sells an on-demand platform with a scheduler attached. We build the channel itself, and everything a channel needs to survive contact with a distributor is here on every plan: cue signalling down to the segmentation type, a published guide feed, as-run logs, and graphics rendered into the picture rather than layered over it.
A scheduler is not a playout engine
Plenty of platforms can loop a playlist and call it linear. The question that decides a carriage conversation is what the channel emits: which SCTE-35 commands, which segmentation types, whether break durations and auto-return are honoured, whether event ids stay stable. Ask any vendor for that list. We publish ours.
The clearest tell is in their own description of ad breaks. Their features page offers an "ad-marker manager: set ad-breaks and call your ad sources for every video", alongside multi-source pre/mid/post-roll ad serving. Those are positions within an asset. A channel running around the clock has no post-roll, because nothing ends. Its breaks sit on a continuous timeline, and each one needs to say what kind of break it is and who is entitled to fill it, which is how server-side ad insertion on a live channel works here.
That is the job SCTE-35 signalling does, and it is the difference between selling your own spots and being carried by someone else. Ours is documented down to the cue type: both command forms, provider and distributor pairs, programme boundaries, and the delivery restrictions that decide who may fill a break.
The unit the plan is sized in
The same pattern shows up in pricing. Streaming minutes are a sensible unit for on-demand: viewers arrive, watch something, and leave, and the formula Lightcast publishes reflects exactly that shape. Their bands are built on it, from 1,000 viewers watching half an hour up to 100,000 watching an hour.
A linear channel breaks the assumption. It plays continuously, and a loyal audience is one that leaves it on. Run their formula against an always-on channel and a very modest audience lands in the Mid-Sized Broadcaster band; a few hundred simultaneous viewers passes the largest band they publish. Nothing about that is a trick, it is what happens when a per-session unit meets a service with no sessions.
Our plans are per channel and delivery is unlimited, so the bill is the same on the quietest night of the year and the night the channel goes viral. That is the entire pricing philosophy, and it is why success here is not a budgeting event.
What actually decides it
If the channel is the product, the deciding features are cue signalling, a programme guide feed, as-run logs, and graphics burned into the picture. Those are the parts we built first and the parts we publish in full, because they are what a distributor asks for and what an advertiser audits.
And you do not trade one for the other. The playout engine runs the channel and the OTT platform runs the on-demand service, on one delivery network, one bill, one login. Tell us what you are launching.