Story beats and the schedule

Two optional ways to steer what a stream is about. They work together.

Beats: a running order

On the stream's edit form, Running order lets you tell the story in steps. Each beat is an instruction plus a number of Clips — how long that beat lasts compared with the others (not a spending setting).

• The stream plays the beats in order, then starts again from the top, so an unattended channel never goes quiet. The page shows how many times the order has played through.
• Reorder beats with the arrows; renaming or moving a beat does not restart the story.
• If the content check turns a beat down, that beat is skipped and shown struck through with the reason. Rewrite it to put it back.
• With no beats, every clip comes from the stream's single instruction.
• Beats cannot make a stream spend faster: Clips ahead is still the limit.

The schedule: topics at set times

Open a stream and choose Schedule. Each block says what the stream is about during a window of time:

• Weekly — on chosen days, e.g. Mon–Fri, 09:00 for 3 hours.
• One-off event — on one date, e.g. 12 May, 15:00 for 2 hours: the cup final.

Times are the clock time you type, in the time zone you pick, so a 09:00 block stays at 09:00 through clock changes.

While a block is on, its topic replaces the running order. When it ends, the story carries on from the beat it had reached. If two blocks overlap, a one-off event beats a weekly block, and otherwise the block that started most recently wins. The schedule page shows the next 24 hours exactly as the stream will play them, including which blocks are hidden by others.

A schedule never starts or stops the stream and never changes what it spends. Topics go through the same content check as everything else; a refused block is stood down and the running order plays instead.

Changing the topic right now

From your own system (a score update, a breaking story), you can push a topic into a running stream through the API — see Using AI Streams from the API. It works like a one-off schedule block that starts this minute.

New topics show up after the clips already queued have played — usually well under a minute for a small Clips ahead, longer if the provider is slow.