GUIDE

Managed playout, or self-serve? Decide by who touches the schedule.

Every playout service runs your channel on somebody else's servers. The question is who operates it: their people or you, with the machine doing the watching. Most new channels run on a middle ground between the two, and five questions settle which one you need. We are on the self-serve side.

The shapes

Who runs the channel.

Cloud says where the machinery is. Managed or self-serve says who drives it. The two get sold as if they were the same axis; they are not.

Managed

Their operators run it

You supply content and approvals; their team runs the channel end to end. The right shape for a broadcaster who wants a channel and no part of operating it, and can wait on a queue for changes.

Self-serve

You run it in a browser

The vendor runs the infrastructure; you run the channel. A change is your afternoon. The trade is that nobody else is deciding what airs, which is either the point or the problem.

The middle

You run it, the machine watches

Self-serve with automation doing the night shift: alerts, fallback, auto-fill, a standby screen, backup inputs. What most channels launched in the last few years actually run on, and where ours sits.

Deciding

Five questions that settle it

Put these to any vendor, including us. The first two decide most cases.

Who changes the schedule on Friday at 4pm?
Under managed playout, you email the change and it lands when their queue reaches it. Under self-serve, you drag the block and it is done. Which one you prefer depends on how often the grid moves and how much you want to touch it.
Who is watching at 3am?
Managed: a person on shift, and you are paying for the shift. Self-serve: the system, if it watches encoder restarts, output disconnects, frozen picture and dropped feeds on its own, falls back to the schedule or a standby screen, and alerts you. Ask exactly what is watched and what happens before anyone is awake.
What is inside "managed"?
Ingest, scheduling, graphics, cue setup, monitoring, incident handling, platform delivery, reporting. Some managed services include all of it; some include monitoring and call the rest professional services. Get the list.
What leaves with you?
Under a managed service, the channel often lives inside the vendor’s systems: the grid, the guide feed, the cue profiles, the stream URL. Ask what you can export on the day you give notice. Under self-serve you built it, so it is yours to take.
What does a quiet month cost, and a busy one?
Managed is priced for the operations whether the channel changed or not. Self-serve is priced for the channel, and a month with a hundred schedule edits costs the same as a month with none.

For the record

Which one we are

Self-serve, with the machine on the night shift. You upload, schedule, and set the graphics and the ad breaks from a browser, and we keep the channel on air. Software does the watching. If the stream restarts, an output disconnects, the picture freezes, the schedule has a gap, an item is missed, or a live feed starts or ends, you get an alert in the console and by email on every plan, and by webhook to Slack or PagerDuty on the FAST plan and up. If a live feed drops, the channel goes back to the schedule. On the FAST plan it can switch to a backup feed first, then a standby screen, and it returns to the main feed on its own. Gaps fill from your library. The as-run log is the record of what aired: every item and every ad cue, how many seconds anything ran early or late, kept for a year.

What we do not do is operate the grid for you. There is no queue to email a change to, because there is no queue; the change is yours to make. On the FAST plan and up, AI scheduling drafts weeks of grid from your rules, which is the nearest thing to a programming department most channels need. Managed distribution, where we run the platform conversations with you, is by invitation. Support is people, by email, and it is support for a channel you run, not a service that runs it.

If that is the wrong shape for you, a managed service is the right call. Ask any provider these seven questions before signing. If it is the right shape, the channel is $254 per month and on air the same day.

See what self-serve looks like on day one

Take an empty channel to on air in five steps, each shown on the console screen where it happens. That is the fastest way to judge whether you want to be the one holding the schedule.

Quick start

Questions

Playout services, answered.

What is managed playout?

A service in which the vendor’s operators run your channel: they ingest your content, build and change the schedule, configure graphics and ad cues, watch the output, and handle incidents. You supply programming and approvals. It is priced per channel with the operations inside, usually by quote, and a change to the grid goes through their queue.

What are playout services?

The phrase covers everything from a fully managed channel to a subscription to playout software in the cloud. When a vendor says "playout services", ask which: who builds the schedule, who watches the channel, and what happens when you want something changed at 4pm on a Friday. The answers put the service on the managed or the self-serve side.

Is cloud playout managed or self-serve?

Either. Cloud says where the machinery runs; managed says who operates it. Some cloud playout is fully managed. Ours is self-serve: you run the channel from a browser and the system runs the infrastructure, watches the output, falls back on its own and tells you what happened.

Do I need broadcast staff to run a self-serve channel?

No. The parts that needed an engineer, keeping the encode stable, holding frame accuracy, switching to a backup when something fails, are the vendor’s in any cloud service. What you do is what a programmer does: upload, schedule, decide what the channel looks like. Most operators here have never worked in a broadcast facility.

What does a managed playout service cost?

Typically a quote per channel that includes the operations team, often with a minimum term. Published prices are rare because the operations part varies. Self-serve cloud playout publishes a number: ours is $254 per channel per month billed yearly or $299 month to month, with delivery included and no contract.

Can I start self-serve and get help later?

With us, yes for distribution and no for day-to-day operations. Managed distribution, where we handle the platform conversations with you, is by invitation. Nobody here builds your grid for you; AI scheduling on the FAST plan and up drafts it from your rules, and the console is where it is edited.

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