We have received a number of requests for adding sites to Zinc. Since ZeeVee doesn't have any of our own content (besides our great training videos), we rely on content from other sites. Zinc uses the the RSS standard for syndicating content from third parties like Hulu and ABC. Very shortly we will be deploying a new feature to support third party content so you can add your own site. If you are a web developer or are familiar with RSS, we will shortly be publishing our RSS specification at http://zinc.tv/developers. In the meantime, you can always contact partners at zeevee dot com.
If you aren’t very familiar with RSS, you can still help out. First of all, what makes a good candidate for inclusion in Zinc? It’s pretty basic. A couple of simple rules:
- The site needs good quality video! Zinc is designed for the living room so the higher resolution the better.
- Preferably, the site will have an RSS feed for various shows or episodes.
- Hopefully, the RSS feed will point directly to an embeddable video or video stream. Add the feed to Zinc by entering the URL into the address bar and clicking on the subscribe button. If the feed has embeddable videos, the video should start when you click a tile.
- The RSS feed should have high quality thumbnails. Many sites use smaller thumbnails because the feeds are targeted at traditional feed readers and not Zinc.
What if a site doesn’t have an RSS page? Well, in that case it is a bit tricky. If you have some web development skills, you can sometimes create a feed from a site’s HTML or modify the existing sites RSS feed. Some good tools for working with feeds are Yahoo pipes and feed43.com. In another post we will dig into creating a feed for Zinc.
In any case, keep up the recommendations for sites!
