Strategies

By default a channel just plays its pool in the base order. The Advanced — grouping & rotation section (strategy-editor.tsx) turns on a strategy: an optional layer that buckets the pool into groups and decides how those groups interleave. It's a bolt-on — off means byte-for-byte the old behavior; the base ordering still governs the order within each group and how groups are sorted.

Turn on Group & rotate this channel's content to reveal:

Rotation — how groups are woven together

• Marathon each group (clustered) — play a group's whole run, then the next group. Great for "one series at a time" blocks.
• Rotate between groups (round_robin) — take a run from one group, then move to another, never the same group back-to-back. This is the "channel-surfing variety" mode. A sub-option, Order, picks Varied (shuffle — reshuffle the group order each lap) or Fixed cycle (cycle — rotate the same pattern).

Grouping rules — what a group is

One or more rules that decide what a group is. Each rule has a scope, a run, and an optional filter. Rules are tried top-down and the first matching rule wins, so put a narrow carve-out above a catch-all.

• Scope:
  • Each show — one group per series.
  • Movies — all movies collapse into one group.
  • Filtered set — the items this rule's filter matches become one group (a marathon carve-out, e.g. "the Star Wars films as a block").
• Run — how much of a group plays per turn:
  • One at a time (1)
  • Block of… — a fixed count or a seeded [min, max] range of episodes (e.g. 2–3)
  • ~ Minutes — a seeded {minutes: [min, max]} window; the engine packs items toward that duration without overshooting the ceiling, so short-episode shows self-adjust (a 22-min show in a 24–30 window is one episode; 7-min shorts pack in until they fill it). Length-aware, no per-show tuning needed.
  • Whole run (all) — the whole group in one turn (a marathon that then drops out).
• Filter (the funnel icon) — narrow which pool items the rule claims, using the same filter builder. Unlike the content filter, a grouping filter is evaluated locally against cached pool metadata (no server round-trip), so it's restricted to fields Airwave caches (local-filter.ts LOCAL_FILTER_FIELDS — title, genre, director, actor, year, rating, resolution, HDR, release date, …). Time-relative fields are deliberately excluded to keep the build deterministic.

Don't repeat a show

An optional cross-pass constraint (noRepeatWithin): keep the same group off the air for N minutes or N shows. The engine runs a starvation scheduler that prefers the longest-un-aired eligible group, and relaxes rather than stalling if a tiny pool can't satisfy the window — every item is still laid exactly once.

How it works (briefly)

Each schedule pass is still a full permutation of the pool (every item exactly once), so a strategy is a pure function of (pool, ordering, seed, passIndex) and slots into the same deterministic build with no special state — except the no-repeat constraint, which carries a small "recently aired" tail across pass boundaries so the window holds at a build seam (timeline.ts strategyPassOrder / constrainedPassOrder). A malformed or empty strategy safely falls back to plain ordering (parseStrategy), so bad config never bricks a channel.

Strategy changes only take effect the next time the schedule is built — use Generate schedule (see The schedule) to apply them immediately.