This is fantastic. To be clear - I am running a little bit of a personal experiment with this conversation. It has been a personal goal to find ways to engage on features like this before we get into full on design/development mode. Thank you for coming along and giving some feedback here.
With that being said, for anyone coming along and checking this out let me be clear that this is purely for conversation and feedback only. We haven’t even started scoping out this as a feature yet and while I hope that we can use this as an example around getting more collaboration going much earlier in the process. Also - please don’t take any of this as any form of commitment towards any of the ideas expressed here (even my own). Apologies for taking up this space, but wanted to make sure the expectations were clear here.
Now let’s get into the fun stuff. First I am very interested in the commercials aspect here. I am assuming that us (plex) being interested in inserting a commercial here and there would receive some negative pushback - is this a valid assumption? But commercials are an interesting topic. I see that the service you mentioned allows for creation of a smart collection (assuming for shorter video clips) that are used for commercials. Do you see this wholly on the server owner to setup and maintain?
Also for commercials is it more important to start them on a time schedule (at the top of the hour) or to fill every possible second using your “commercials” and if the start time has to be shortened or lengthened due to commercial length that is ok? Or would you cut commercials off? Or would you have something like a static image that might show for the extra 18 seconds that the video + “commercials” couldn’t fill to round out a 30m block?
Another question around this one:
How would you see this working for multiple users? Would each user advance the timer? Or would you want the time marker on a per-user basis (meaning that we would have to track a marker for each user/managed user/shared library user on the server).
