{"id":83,"date":"2017-02-15T16:57:48","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T16:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live.ecd-demo.com\/apihelp\/?page_id=83"},"modified":"2025-07-21T17:12:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T17:12:02","slug":"red-bee-program-hierarchy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/documentation\/what-does-the-api-contain\/red-bee-program-hierarchy\/","title":{"rendered":"Simply.TV Store Hierarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Program Hierarchy Levels<\/h3>\n

A series of related programs can be structured in several different ways. Also, a program can be broadcast in different formats and in different ways at different times. The Simply.TV Content Discovery API data model uses a hierarchy of up to six different levels to model these relationships. Examples of how a program might sit within this hierarchy are shown in the following diagram.<\/p>\n

\"Program<\/p>\n

The six different levels are as follows:<\/p>\n

SERIES<\/h3>\n

The top-level container for a set of episodes that are related, typically by a common title, e.g. Game of Thrones<\/em>, The Walking Dead<\/em>, EastEnders<\/em>.<\/p>\n

SEASON<\/h3>\n

A smaller set of episodes that is a subset of a series. Drama series, comedies etc. typically have numbered seasons, e.g. Game of Thrones Season 8<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For sports a season will be used to group all the programs related to one tournament or one year’s games within a league, e.g. all the programs about Formula 1 races in 2019.<\/p>\n

Programs that are broadcast 52 weeks a year, e.g. most news programs and soap operas such as EastEnders<\/em>, are not split into seasons. For those the episodes are placed directly in the series.<\/p>\n

MULTI-PART PROGRAM<\/h3>\n

Used in the infrequent case where one story is told across multiple episodes within a season. An example is Silent Witness<\/em>, where each story spans two episodes. A multi-part program groups all the episodes that tell one such story.<\/p>\n

PROGRAM<\/h3>\n

A program is the basic unit of content. It can be an episode (e.g. Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 5: The Bells<\/em>) or a movie (e.g. Avengers: Endgame<\/em>) or (less frequently) a stand-alone program (e.g. David Attenborough’s Climate Change: The Facts<\/em>).<\/p>\n

A program document does not contain information about how, when or in what format the program is broadcast. That’s represented by the two lower levels.<\/p>\n

PROGRAM VARIATION<\/h3>\n

This level is not populated in every instance of the API. It is most commonly used for Video on Demand (VoD), when a VoD catalogue packages the same program in two ways: once for purchasing\/viewing in SD, and once in HD. In this case the API will contain a program variation document for the SD version and a program variation document for the HD version (including separate IDs for the two versions).<\/p>\n

EVENT<\/h3>\n

For linear broadcasting (as shown on an EPG), an event is an instance of a specific program broadcast on a specific channel at a specific time.<\/p>\n

For VoD, an event document represents a VoD package, i.e. a license to make a specific program available for purchase or viewing for a period of time. If the platform offers the program packaged in different formats (e.g. SD or HD) and has separate IDs for the different packages, the API will represent that by different events linked to different program variations.<\/p>\n

The event document includes an eventType attribute whose value will be either linear<\/em> or vod<\/em> to indicate which scenario that document applies to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Program Hierarchy Levels A series of related programs can be structured in several different ways. Also, a program can be broadcast in different formats and in different ways at different times. The Simply.TV Content Discovery API data model uses a hierarchy of up to six different levels to model these relationships. Examples of how a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":66,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-83","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1488,"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/83\/revisions\/1488"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apihelp.ecd-demo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}