Screenfeed Debuts Entertainment Center, For Long Dwell Time Content Needs

September 12, 2018 by Dave Haynes

Minneapolis-based subscription content provider Screenfeed has very cleverly pulled together a new service – called Entertainment Center – designed to serve the needs of the many, many waiting areas and lounges out there that have long dwell times and now use cable TV news channels to distract customers.

“We’re very excited about this because we’ve never been GREAT in solving the need for networks who need to entertain for a long dwell time, or have requirements for video with audio,” says CEO Jeremy Gavin. “We had to sort of patch together a solution to try to meet our customer’s needs the way we wanted to – until now.”

Location owners tend to use cable as a default, Screenfeed reasons, knowing the it’s not been the best option, but not really having an alternative.  Using news channels has grown increasingly problematic because of the hyper-polarized political climate in the US, where people in waiting rooms argue over whether CNN or Fox should be on. Some have resorted to putting two TVs in with two different feeds.

With Entertainment Center, says the company in a press release, Screenfeed gives networks access to a wide variety of video content that can be selected from and changed anytime – all within one easy subscription.  The content is really quite good and features sports with in-game highlights (hard to get), delicious recipes, entertainment news, amazing tech features, daily weather forecasts delivered by meteorologists and more. There is plenty there for networks to choose what is right for them.

We’ve now been doing this a long time and know the pain points of operating a network and we’ve put in the effort to solve them in a number of ways:

• Audio Normalization – We’ve built a process to normalize all of the video content to a consistent perceived decibel levels so that content from many sources sound consistent to your audience;

• Curation – We’ve hand-picked sources of content that are really very interesting and that we know will actually entertain an audience.  Screenfeed’s editorial team reviews the content to ensure quality, interest and appropriateness and we provide custom curation for clients as a service as well;

• Automated Delivery – We save network operators time by automating the delivery of the content we have reviewed to their playlist. No searching from a volume of content of mixed quality and needing to manually update a playlist;

• Easy Self-Moderation Tool –  Those that want complete control can use their mobile device or desktop to watch all of the content being sent to their screens and either pre-approve before they are sent to the screen, or instantly remove an video with a click or a tap.

Gavin says the new service “represents a slightly different sales model where we give customers access to a full set of content and they choose the categories that work for them.  Pricing is still based on a monthly fee per player and customers who are interested can contact us for more info and pricing.”

Update – I asked Gavin how this works, in terms of refresh cycles and duration of programming:
We take a daily or weekly refresh approach with consultation with the network based on their audience dwell time and frequency of return.

For a network where customers visit once a month or greater but have a long dwell time – such as a medical waiting room or automotive lobby, we can easily fill a 2-hour playlist that refreshes each week.

For a network with a shorter dwell time of 20-30 minutes such as a break room, coffee shop, or lobby, we can update that content daily so you don’t see the same thing the next day.

We provide playlist strategy along with it to help network operators make the most of the content. For example creating feeds fo content for two playlists and swapping them from AM to PM in successive days to prevent someone who comes to workout at the same time everyday from seeing similar content.