Customer-facing search on ZenVideo OTT

Customers can search the OTT site via the search bar in the top navigation. It is important to use clear titles and descriptions for all your content to yield the most effective results.

The search results will then display any relevant collection, videos, or product listed on the platform.

When a customer searches your site, your videos, collections, and products that are part of an active subscription will be compared to the title, description, short description, genres, cast, crew, and tags that you have supplied. Other metadata fields on your video and collection pages will also help your customers discover new content. Read more about adding metadata to collections and videos. 

Search results do not differ across platforms. 

Removing content from search results

If you have content that you do not want to appear in search, it’s important to remember to set that content as Unavailable. While a video that is not part of a Collection is not discoverable by your customers by simply clicking around, if the Video is part of a “Plan,” it will be included in search results.

To remove a Video from search results:

• Go to your Content tab and then edit the video you’d like to remove
• Go to the Distribution tab in the left sidebar
• Scroll down to the Plans section
• Uncheck all plans
• Save your changes

Metadata and collections

Metadata can be added in the Discovery tab of your Collection and includes: 

• Tags: Ad hoc hashtags that describe your content. These will be used to help your customers discover your content. They are not shown to the customer by default (though they can be turned on in the Site Settings). In the image below, we added the “outdoors” tag to the playlist, only to have it surface in search of the customer searching for the term “outdoors”:
  
  
  
• A Media ID: This is an internal identifier that can be leveraged for searching your own catalog or for generating reports with our API. This is internal only and doesn’t affect your viewer’s search results. 

There are also several fields of API-specific metadata. Read more about those in this article. 

Metadata and videos

You can also add standard metadata to your videos (e.g. genre, release date, director, ratings, etc.) so that your customers can easily discover related content they might enjoy. Adding metadata to videos also allows you to make it easier for viewers to find your content via search or other parameters. Read all about adding video metadata in this article. It’s also possible to bulk update your metadata; this article will walk you through the steps of doing so.