Spinitron as our System of Record

⚙️ Web integration
1

Couple of questions on Spinitron show schedules and the web API . . .is it possible to use the ‘Edit Show’ and the Web API to pass something to our client software that the user can’t see?

Here’s why we’re asking - We are looking at changing up our broadcast software to limit the duplicate configurations in multiple software applications when we modify our program schedule. We’re looking to replace a traffic system and enhance our automation system with a front end that feeds it automation instructions.

Spinitron is a big part of our broadcast application set and we’re exploring two things:

  1. Make Spinitron our ‘system of record’ for program schedules. We’d use the Spinitron web API to grab program schedules and propagate the schedule info to our traffic and broadcast automation systems. Since Spinitron does such a good job of advanced scheduling, it would be a good candidate to drive all our other software. We are far enough into design and proof of concept to know this works for our current application portfolio. We can track changes to our program schedule in Spinitron and propagate those changes to our traffic and automation systems automatically, saving a lot of time and helping to avoid clerical errors.

  2. Programmatically modify Spinitron via an API when our program schedule changes, .and use another application for our ‘system of record’, passing program schedule changes into Spinitron.

For option #1, we’d like to be able to ‘cue’ our other software that a few of our broadcasts are repeats/reruns and handle those broadcasts differently. We could just rename the rerun, say, from “Jazz Today” to “Jazz Today (Repeat)” so that our other applications see two distinct programs and can handle “Jazz Today” and “Jazz Today (Repeat)” differently. What would be nice if there was some way in which we could distinguish the repeat from the non-repeat broadcasts at our end from the Spinitron ‘shows’ API that the user couldn’t see. Is this possible?

For option #2 we’d need to be able to update our Spinitron program schedule programmatically from our web client software. I don’t believe that’s possible right now, but I could be wrong.