Improved handling of seasons in Catalog

The standard hierarchy of publishable assets for broadcasting follows this pattern:-

[Strand or Brand] > Series > Season > Episode > Segment

Currently in the Crea catalog we have a Season as a Content, and Episodes and Segments as Productions, related to each other. The Series information is captured within an entity embedded in Content.

The drawback of this approach is that most of the time the descriptive information in the Season is common and is the same as that in the Series. In fact, on our websites there is no provision for a separate title or description for a Season. This means that the user is entering duplicated information most of the time for each Season.

One solution would be to add a Season indicator to the Production box in the Catalog. If the Add New Series button allowed you to add a Season number this would mean that Content could represent a Series instead of a Season, avoiding duplication of information across Seasons. This does mean it would not be possible to add information unique to a Season but as mentioned this does not happen very often.

The most flexible solution would be to have the ability to create both a Series and a Season entity, with the Season entity as optional. Most of the time it will be the same, but it is possible for a Season to have a different description and (very rarely) title.

The concept of Strand or Brand is not actually used at TVO but I mention it here because it is a valid concept and other broadcasters use it (eg BBC). The idea is to be able to group Series together that are essentially part of the same production concept but have different titles. Here is an example:

Strand/Brand: “The great British bake off”

Series: “The great British bake off”

Series: “Junior bake off”

Series: “The great British bake off Christmas special”