Taffy

We offer our clients a lot of features and functionalities at Stretch, so at times we like to remind our clients of some useful features they can take advantage of to provide both them and their fans a more pleasant streaming experience.

Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the things you can do with our RSS Manager. This is a feature that can be accessed by clicking the “RSS Manager” link in the back-end admin page. Pretty creative name, we know.

RSS stands for really simple syndication and it’s a feed system that has been around for more than a decade now. You might be familiar with using it to consume content from news sites or blogs.

It’s the same basic concept at Stretch: Each time you add an event using the event editor it automatically is added to the RSS feed. You can get the entire feed by clicking RSS manager, scrolling to the bottom of the list and selecting “Pull Raw Feed.” Keep in mind that there is one feed for live and future events and a second feed for On Demand events. You can toggle between the two at the top of the page.

This can be helpful for your own personal use or if you have fans who are unable to access the portal for whatever reason – be it technical difficulties or visual impairment that is causing your fans difficulty in accessing the normal portal.

In addition to the general feed, you can also get the direct RSS link. This will open the selected event in the portal and automatically start playing the event if it is underway. This can be useful in several situations.

The most common use of this feature is for testing. If you are checking everything at a field or in an auditorium, you can set up a test event and hide it in the portal from the public view. Then, you can give the direct link to your athletic director, fellow SID or the IT guy who has been helping you for weeks but you keep calling him the wrong name. That way Jeremy can pull up the link in the portal and check on the test.

You can also use this to distribute a link to an event you only want certain people to be able to access. For example if you are streaming a booster club banquet and want only members of the booster club who live in Kentucky to have access, you can e-mail that direct RSS link to every Bluegrass booster and they’ll be able to view it from the comforts of their home (sipping bourbon and eating some KFC to complete the stereotype, no doubt) while everyone else is none the wiser that there’s an event, since nothing is listed in the portal.

These are some of the practical applications of our RSS Manager feature. As always, get in touch if there are any questions we can help with or if you’d like to know more about this feature.