Introduction to Objects

What are Objects?

Skylark's Object system provides a comprehensive and flexible solution for organizing your media assets and metadata. At its core, the system consists of various containers called Objects, which can store a wide range of data related to your media.

Skylark comes with a selection of pre-made Object Types that serve as a starting point for constructing your data set. These Object Types have been carefully designed to support common use cases and workflows. However, if you need to tailor your Objects to meet specific requirements, Skylark offers a powerful Schema Configuration Tool that enables you to define your own custom Object Types.

With the Schema Configuration Tool, you can create a unique set of metadata fields, and relationships for each existing Object Type as well as create brand new ones. This allows you to build a highly specialised and granular data model that accurately reflects the needs of your IP. The API is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, so you can quickly configure your Object Types and start using them to manage your media assets.

Included Object Types

The built-in Skylark data model has the following default object types:

• Episode
• Season
• Brand
• Movie
• Genre
• Theme
• ParentalGuidance
• Rating
• Person
• Credit
• Role

These object types can be updated to suit your needs, and new object types can be added via the self-configuration API.

Special Objects

The built-in data model also includes these special, proprietary object types. Due to the functionality they support, these types cannot be removed.

• Asset: An asset represents a video asset
• Image: An image can be related to any other object type
• TextTrack: This contains information regarding subtitles
• AudioTrack: This contains audio information including codec, bitrate and channels
• VideoTrack: This contains video information including codec, bitrate etc
• DRMProvider: This contains information regarding a specified DRM Provider
• ProviderCredential: This contains information regarding OVP creditials
• PlaybackProvider: This contains information regarding a given OVP provider
• PlaybackDetail: This contains details regarding playback information
• PlaybackDetailAttribute: This contains extra information regarding playback
• Tag: A tag is a value that can be related to any other object type
• Set: A set is a collection of objects which can be used for homepages, rails, etc
• Channel: Contains information relating to live video playback
• EPGProgram: Contains information relating to live video playback

Included Enums

Enums are a way of limiting input to a predefined set of options. Skylark includes the following enums built in for setting an object's type.

• ImageType (with values: MAIN, HEADER, FOOTER, BACKGROUND, POSTER, LANDSCAPE, PREVIEW, FEATURE, THUMBNAIL, PRE_LIVE, POST_LIVE)
• SetType (with values: PAGE, RAIL, SLIDER, COLLECTION)
• AssetType (with values: MAIN, TRAILER)

The values for these enums can be removed or new values can be added. You can also create entirely new enums.

Special Enums

In the same way as the object types, there are a number of special Enums that cannot be removed.

• VideoFormat: SD, HD, 4K etc
• VideoColour: BW, COLOUR etc
• VideoColourEncoding: PAL, NTSC, HDR10 etc
• VideoColourDepth: SDR or HDR
• TextTrackFormat: SRT, VTT, SCC
• TokenAlgorithm: HS256 or RS256
• PlaybackType: Live or VOD