Dappler - Your In-Store Radio Station

Pools - In-Store Radio Station on Your Desktop

Pooling presents a very powerful and abstracted way of managing content. Distributed audio systems usually require very large playlists, and at the same time, there is often a requirement to segment playback into groups such as advertisements, notifications and music. Furthermore, there is often a need to randomize playback within those segments giving a more natural and ‘live radio’ feel to the content.

The Pooling feature in CampaignManager allows users to create pools of related files which are then used for randomized playback based on cyclic patterns. 

Pool Patterns are used to put the pools together emulating structured playlists similar to those used in commercial radio and TV broadcasting.  

Consider the following scenario; Audio is to be played back in 30 minute programming blocks. Each block is to consist of one news item, followed by a sports item, followed by 20 minutes of music, and ending with two advertisements. CampaignManager facilitates such a task as follows:

Create the Pool for In-Store Radio

Pools are created for each of the discrete segments of content you wish to program. Items are then added to each pool. You can also ‘weight’ audio items so that some items occur more frequently than others. Such Pools may look like this:

Create the In-Store Radio Pattern

The Pool Pattern determines the pattern with which items are drawn from the available pools. A Pool Pattern consists of a number of ‘Pool Blocks’. Continuing with the above scenario, the Pool Pattern would be something like this:

Each block will draw random files from its assigned pool, but will exhaust the pools playlist before repeating any files (unless the play count for a particular file is greater than one) 

Time based rules can be applied to individual 'Blocks' in order to allow a Block to draw files from different pools depending on the time of the day. For example, if we take the above Pool Pattern, we can modify Block two to draw files from the Advert Pool between 9 and 11 pm (instead of the Sport Pool), and then revert back to the Sport Pool for the remainder of the day.

The CampaignManager Project

CampaignManager works with Project files which contain all the elements required to manage a network of any size. These elements are Campaigns, Remote Dappler Devices (RDDs), Categories and Pools.

- Campaigns

CampaignManager works around the concept of a Campaign which is published to a Dappler player(s). A Campaign is a collection of information with a related Schedule, Content and Distribution Map. This concept can be thought of as What? When? Where? When creating Campaigns, users are asked three questions:

1. What do you want to play?
2. When do you want to play it?
3. Where do you want to play it?

The Campaign is the discrete unit of work within the system and editing, publishing Campaigns is really not much more complex than sending an email.

- Remote Dappler Devices

RDDs represent the actual computers/Dappler Instances that make up your network. A useful way to think of how this works is to consider the RDD as a radio station or frequency on which you broadcast. A single computer or many computers can ‘tune in’ to that particular frequency or channel.

- Categories of In-Store Radio

CampaignManager contains a rich and powerful categorization engine. This enables the categorization of all playback computers in your network. For example, you may wish to record the location, physical size of a store, cost per impression, demographic, customer, position or any combination of business data you are interested in targeting. Once categorized, campaigns can then be targeted by using filtering. For example, you may wish to publish certain content to end points that are for Customer A, in City B where the cost per impression is X.

- Managing Content with In-Store Radio Software

CampaignManager makes managing content easy. Each Campaign has a designer. The designer consists of one or more Zones. Each Zone has a playlist.

Creating a playlist is easy. You can simply drag and drop audio items onto the individual zones. There is no limit to the amount of items in a play list and the same items can be repeated if desired in the playlist.

What Audio can be Published?

At Ryarc we have focused on ensuring CampaignManager will handle every type of content you wish to play. You may add the following items to a playlist:

• MP3
• WMA
• WAV

Managing Remote Audio (Dappler) Player PCs

Managing a public network of PCs requires more from software than getting a piece of media from A to B at the right time. The software must also enable you to effectively manage those Dappler players ensuring maximum up time and minimum site visits.

A lot of products focus solely on getting media from A to B leaving you with a lot of potential problems in managing your network. Here’s what we’ve done to help make your life easier.

- Monitoring Dappler In-Store Radio

CampaignManager monitors all the players in your network and can send you an email as soon as a failure is detected.

- Direct Remote Access with In-Store Radio Software

Double click an affected PC in the Dappler monitor to automatically start a Remote Desktop or VNC session to that PC regardless of whether the PC exists in a static IP network or not.

- Universal Serial/RS232 Control for Hardware

CampaignManager provides tools to create your own serial commands for your hardware. Whether it’s integrating with an AMX system, adjusting the volume or the source input, you can write libraries of custom serial commands and reuse them across multiple machines.

- Remote Commands for Dappler In-Store Radio

CampaignManager allows you to send remote commands to any device. Common commands include rebooting and restarting. Commands can be scheduled to execute immediately, in the future or even at intervals. CampaignManager supports Windows PowerShell and even .net Code which can be compiled and run at any location at any time. This makes even complex administration of the remote PCs a much easier task.

- Scale Out; Not Up

Because CampaignManager utilises web servers to do the ‘heavy lifting’, it is easy to take advantage of the well established and understood methods of web server load balancing. Networks that frequently publish large amounts of audio can take advantage of common load balancing techniques by sharing the load between more than one server. Most In store radio software applications rely on FTP servers or direct communication over TCP, making load balancing a much more difficult task.

- NodeServer for Dappler In-Store Radio

CampaignManager comes with a tool for further reducing bandwidth and server stress called NodeServer. NodeServer acts like a proxy server for a group of locally connected Dappler players ensuring that no redundant downloads are made and sharing files from a single request amongst unlimited connected Dappler players is possible.

- Automatic Profiling of your Distributed Audio Network Ecosystem

CampaignManager can automatically gather information such as hard drive space, time zone, last upgrade, CPU usage, machine name and details of the associated operating system.