It is imperative for brothas and sistas to establish a media framework to cultivate economic development in our urban communities. We need our own Black-owned media framework to promote our businesses down to local level and create social responsible Black entrepreneurs who can and will give back to the community and lay a foundation for the younger cats to build upon when they come up.
In this article, we are going to talk about how brothas and sistas can use both database and algorithms to manage their media streaming playlist. This article will be a little technical and I will provide technical code on the Dream and Hustle Facebook for download. So if you are interested in this topic, join the Dream and Hustle Facebook page at http://facebook.com/dreamandhustle for expanded content.
Please note I will be providing you with real research done by the 3rd Strategic Institute to create our upcoming MochaStar Media broadcasting network. We believe this article will provide you direction on creating a broadcast channel in your hood and scalable up to a Black-owned global media empire. Alright, let’s stop wasting time as you brothas and sistas got the whole world to take over.
Broadcast Streaming Patterns
Before I get started, I want to explain I will use a generic term called ‘media asset” in this article. The reason why this article can apply for any form of media streaming. For example, you can use the algorithm we discussing to stream music files for an online radio or subscription music streaming service. You can also use the algorithm to stream video to your IPTV networks situated in commercial zones in the hood. Here is another tip – you can stream photos for digital signage and you can also stream content/articles from various blogs creating a feed/ticket tape server like you see in Manhattan.
There are two main ways you can broadcast your media and that is through queuing and through algorithms.
Queued Streaming. This is where you create the playlist of what media assets to play after each other in your broadcast. Play this, then play that, then play this and then play that – you queue up what you want to play one after another. If you operate a house music or dirty south rap online streaming radio station, you queue up the tracks you want to play and broadcast in a linear format. This is replicating the current terrestrial media broadcasting model of radio stations with a DJ personality who plays a certain genre of music.
Algorithm Streaming. This is how most music service operates where a user enter their artist or a genre and a playlist is dynamically generated based on the artist or genre chosen. So if someone entered Rick James, they hear 1970s Prince, Teena Marie, the Mary Jane Girls, Eddie Murphy singing “My Girl Wants to Party all the Time” and other songs similar to Rick James. This type of streaming allows people to choose their own individual playlist based on a personal preference instead of listening to some DJ personality ego and their broadcast.
Let’s talk advantages and disadvantages so you can strategize how you want to broadcast your media.
The advantage of manually queued streaming is you can have a professional playlist creator create smooth flow of songs that are related and blend well. So let’s say you running an IPTV network, you can manually queue two 30-minute comedies and one hour long drama video and another one hour documentary before displaying a news break and someone created this list professionally. Or for music, you can create downtempo songs to build up to an uptempo climax during a broadcast session hour as the professional know what songs to play to make this happen.
The advantage of algorithm streaming is you can get more people and subscribers on your media and they all listening to what they want to listen to. In other words, if you have a global collection of media assets from all over the world, then anybody in the world can create their own playlist. So you have an algorithm that can play Afrobeat for African cats, Reggaeton for Latin American cats, House Music for European cats, K-pop for Asian cats and Top 40 here in America at the same time.
The disadvantage of queued streaming is you limit yourself to the expertise of the professional playlist creator. If all that playlist creator know is house music, then you have to hire someone who knows urban contemporary and that is extra experts you have to hire and your growth is slowed and expensive. The disadvantage of algorithm streaming is the music chosen can be dry and lame with no collective rhythm or emotion in the playlist.
What we recommend you do with your Black-owned global media empire is focus on combining the advantages for algorithm-generated playlists and manually-generated playlists. You can have a person generate their favorite artist or genre and an algorithm generate a pre-selected playlist of the best content back to back using real-time data and rating data of other users.
Yes, Your Favorite Black Media Host Is Obsolete and They Need to Find a New Job!
If you can create an algorithm streaming service capable of generating playlists for an individual, then you do not need to hire an ego-based radio DJ or morning show host cracking jokes and repeating entertainment gossip everybody already read about and saw on TMZ over 3 hours ago. Sure, they will try to argue there is no personal touch or voice or connection without a radio DJ or media personality. Well, that is the reason why we wrote an earlier article about creating continuity content for your Black media operation.
You create continuity content between your playlist media to insert advertisement and insert a quick update on news, weather and sports based on their local area if you running an IPTV or online radio broadcast. Heck, you can get a local ex-stripper butt model to do a quick update on the news and weather, you don’t need to pay some clown comedian a $300k/year contract to crack jokes all the damn time. Why you think they firing these radio DJs left and right and not renewing their contracts on these terrestrial radio stations? Nobody need their stuck up media personality ass anymore and that’s real talk.
Don’t tell me to feel sorry for these about-to-be unemployed Black media personalities, come on now! These radio DJs for example acted like they were too good to play demo tapes of local artists and the program manager acted a fool also. Personally, I don’t give a damn if the local artist made the song with chiptunes using a Nintendo NES to lay down their track, you can actually use your streaming algorithm playlist to create a playist for individuals who want to listen to the local Toledo, Ohio rap scene.
Again, your Black-owned global media empire do not need some bitchy uppity DJ or radio programmer dissing some local artist out of Toledo and guess what? Your media empire can promote that local act in Toledo, give them airtime and that artist can help perform at the opening of local Black businesses in Toledo like a barbershop or heels, purse and kick store, attracting customers. That’s how you engage local talent to become local stars in their community to help local businesses attract local customers and that is how local Black media should work to build economic development in our hoods, homey!
With continuity content, you can get anybody to announce your show station call at the top of the hour and insert advertisements between media assets in your streaming media operation. You don’t need some semi-celebrity morning show host sitting on their butts in an expensive studio paying them a full $200K+ salary and ish. You can run a Black-owned global media empire on less than the salary you paying these Black media personality clowns acting like they important and ish. So these radio DJs and these other Black media personalities better find a new job working at iHop or Best Buy or do a side hustle repairing cracked mobile phone screens and leave your Black-owned global media empire the hell alone!
Technical Approach to Your Streaming Media Service
The big picture of your technical solution is you have a large collection of media assets and you play them in a certain order as a broadcast to your customer. That is straightforward as your computer media player or your iTunes does that and go even further with iTunes Genius. Again, you do not want to just broadcast a playlist of a collection of media assets – you want to broadcast your media streaming empire that runs advertisements and accept monthly subscription to generate revenue. This is business we talking about here, not some hobby or cute stuff.
Let’s talk about the various options to broadcast your media assets:
Generate Playlist online, Stream Interactive Broadcast. This is where you load all of your media files up on the Internet and you have a playlist generator also online as well as your algorithm. When a user enter a track, they get a playlist generated and start streaming each media assets one after each other with advertising inserts, your continuity content and other information.
Generate Playlist at Home, Stream Prerecorded Broadcast. You generate the playlist at home and record the entire playlist into a single one-hour broadcast. Everything is generated at your home or office from the song arrangement, continuity message and advertisements in the one-hour broadcast. You then upload this one-hour broadcast to YouTube and/or SoundCloud and this is how you startup as fast and cheap as you can.
If you host your media online and you have a lot of media assets, it will cost you a lot of money per month to host these files. So it is advisable and our approach will be using a $5/month GoDaddy web site to host our files. In the future, we can host through Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure cloud services and take advantage of global CDN capabilities. If you do pre-recorded shows, the one major problem is you will have problems showing the metadata of a media assets like the song that is playing currently and you will lose revenue potential to not dynamically having a link to buy that media asset at Amazon or iTunes.
To me, I would focus on bypassing the whole generate a pre-recorded broadcast option even though it sounds good. I would focus on maximizing revenue generation from the very beginning with links to buy the media assets and you also need to learn the rating for each media asset being played. We will discuss this in the algorithm section but you want to learn if the customer likes a song or hates a song or skips over a song.
With that said, let’s look at hosting this solution on a $5/month GoDaddy Windows hosting account where we use the SQL Server to store the media asset information and algorithms and use the web site as a web service to execute SSL requests from clients to provide the stored media files. Please note you can still use a $5/month GoDaddy account and have the media files hosting on a cloud server for streaming and this is necessary because need those media assets to go through a streaming host and not necessarily be stores on a web site.
Creating the Data Structure for Your Algorithm
African-Americans should not learn how to code first, they should learn how to create data structures and store data and manipulate data in a database. I’ve been saying that for years and I’m an expert at this and will say it again, learn SQL because if you don’t, then everything you doing is lightweight stuff and that’s real talk. You will never make it far in this game if you do not understand how to manage databases and data.
The above diagram is a just an overview and the actual database will be more expansive and technical than this. Let’s just go over the main elements – please read this section seriously and get a full understanding of what is being done as most of all your technical work is done in the database code.
Media Assets. This is information on the media file in question. You can find metadata on music files by looking at the properties using code but some you have to manually enter. For example, a song can have the song title, artist, producer, record label, year released and cover art image. Please note your continuity messages can be a media asset such as your station announcement at the top of the hour and stored in this section.
Media Genre. This is the genre or category the media asset falls under and for IPTV, you can put reality tv, talk show, situational comedies and so on. Keep in mind that a media asset can fall under multiple genres like a song can be in both Korea Top 40 chart and K-Pop genre list. Please note, MochaStar Media will dynamically create a playlist based on outside charts for Top 10 or Top 40 genre.
Media Culture. This is the culture of the music and we can define it as not only USA, but Black American or Latino America or Mexican or Puerto Rican or El Salvadorian and Tawainese and so on. This allows us to match the culture of the end user to play media that caters to them for example, play naija to the Nigerian community or present it on the home page while presenting urban contemporary to the African-American community here in the US.
User Account. This will be the login information of your media subscription service. You can store the email/password in this area. Keep in mind your customer can not only be regular people but it can be a business like a barbershop or hair salon that have an account to access your IPTV or digital signage stream.
User Profile. This is where your billing history as well as information on the user of your service is stored. So if they are on a monthly subscription plan, when you will charge for their service and how much they pay. You also store their profile information such as their age group, their sex and culture they are located in.
User Favorites. This will be a saved list of favorite artists, IPTV shows, favorite bloggers or topics that a user can select and the algorithm will generate a playlist from. This allow the user to have quick presets as an option when they load up your service.
User History. You should keep a log of every song that was played and for what user. If you are paying royalties, this is very important to have this log in place to understand the frequency and your budget. For example, you may want to limit free users to just 10 songs a day before asking them to subscribe and you need a history log to know this information. Or they can only watch one free episode of your IPTV a week, this is why you need a user history log of all media assets played.
User Rating. You see the existing media streaming services where you can put a thumbs up or thumbs down if you like or dislike the media asset currently being played. Let me give you guys an international hint – use smile and frown faces as thumbs up and thumbs down is not a universal sign of like and dislike.
Media Playlist. This is where you store media playlist that will be returned to the user and this can be a pre-recorded or pre-selected playlist. So for example, if someone types in a popular artist that is Top 40 right now, I have a pre-selected playlist of all Top 40 artist to play one after another. This can be a comma-delimited list of media asset ids and I can also shuffle the order of the playlist to appear dynamic.
Creating the Code/Program for Your Algorithm
Now that you created your data structure and what data will be contained, you want to create the service layer which consist of class libraries containing functions that will be exposed as a web service. In your mobile app or your desktop or smart TV service, you are making calls back and forth to your web service to issue commands on what to display to the user and what to stream as media to them. So let’s look at the type of services you will need to code out.
User Services. This is your login(), retrievepassword(), getbilling() web service calls that your app will make and get information back on the subscriber of the feed.
UI Services. These are services that are for the UI screen and menu options like getGenre() or getUserFavorites() and can also get a list of menu options to actually display on the screen like changeBackgroundColor() and more.
Playlist Services. These are commands that control the media stream such as play(), skipforward() and stop() or even pause() and these are stored on the database to stop a media at the 3:00 minute mark and continue when the user press the play button.
Media Services. This is the information about the media asset and allow the user to do things such as SaveAsFavorite() or DisplayMetadata() or CreateItunesLink() and other features on the media file itself.
Information Services. This is where you can retrieve information services such as GetTrafficInfo() or GetNews() or PlayAnnouncement() and other information that you can bring into your media streaming service.
Now, Let’s Get Moving!
I given you brothas and sistas an overview of how to create algorithm programing of your media broadcast and how to automate playlists. So you can create a dynamic media broadcast service that can generate a playlist and stream the playlist to the user and fill in both your continuity message and advertising. So let’s look at the flow so you can see how your service should work.
If you running a music streaming service and you ask for my favorite artist, I will type “Kyary Paymu Paymu” as my favorite artist. Then your service will retrieve a list of artists and songs part of the J-Pop or K-Pop scene and generate a playlist. That playlist will have continuity messages between every other song saying the name of your media before moving to the next song. You can also insert audio advertisements and commercials during the playlist. You also charge me $5.99/month for this service and you generate revenue from subscriptions and advertisements.
If you didn’t realized, your Black-owned global media empire just played music from Japan to a brotha who like that music while Radio One is still playing Lil Wayne and Drake to everybody out there over and over again and paying some clown $300K and a multi-year contract to crack jokes and ish. So tell me again, who you think going to win this media war again – your Black-owned global media empire that caters to anybody in the world or the current Boule Black media programming negative music and rotating it over and over to a general Black audience? Yeah, thought so.
The next step, well the next step is to show you cats how to plot the hustle and outsource your code creation using Microsoft tools and services and you going to be surprised and shocked at the free available tools out there to get your global Black media empire up and running in no time. In the meantime, work on your continuity content and get that together, okay?