Emby Sideshow – A Blog Competition Idea

[user24 94]

Hi Emby team (attn. Mktg), here’s an idea that you might be interested in...?

Currently, the Community Forums are very useful, but also extremely technical and potentially challenging for newcomers. Also, the Product Announcement Blogs are good, but sometimes posts are few and far between. Therefore, perhaps Emby could consider launching a user-based blog, to generate ongoing and enticing experiential content.

For a bit of on-brand fun, call it Emby “Sideshow”, to differentiate it from “The Main Event” corporate blogs. You could run it as a competition, where there’s a monthly or quarterly prize of (say?) a 12- month Premiere License awarded for the best blog. The winner could either use this for themselves or gift it to a family member, or friend.

The Sideshow blog criteria could be quite broad and very simple:

• a positive experience about Emby Your Media Your Way.
• circa 500 words (3/4 of a page).
• 2-3 supporting photos, screen shots, code examples.

Someone could blog about their extensive Star Wars collection and how they have it well-organised within Emby. Someone else may wish to explain how they’ve used an Emby plug-in to solve a specific problem. Much similar content already exists in the forums, but it can be quite difficult to find and sometimes it’s spread across different areas amongst unrelated posts. The Sideshow blog would not be for flagging problems, feature requests or promoting Emby competitors.

Some customer advantages:

• they may win a nice prize, along with bragging-rights until the next winner is announced.
• more people would read their blog posts on Emby’s site than if they just used their own blog/website/social pages.
• it would be a great way to share more info, as part of their digital media hobby.

Some Emby advantages:

• a small tech-focussed team doesn’t usually have the bandwidth to create extensive marketing collateral.
• blog extracts could be used elsewhere for further promoting Emby.
• links to the blog posts, on Emby-related social media sites, should increase market reach and improve organic SEO.

I’ve managed something similar from the company side. I’ve seen submissions range from 100 word off-topic posts that cannot be published, through to genius technical solutions that take 1000+ words to fully explain, but unfortunately with no punctuation at all! Most people that submitted blogs tended to be very good at writing and had their own unique style.

A blog competition takes a bit of effort to launch and run, but it would be significantly more expensive to generate the same amount of subject-matter with an in-house marketing team or consultants. Also, current Emby users would provide genuine use-cases that are not just corporate marketing-speak. If Emby introduced something like this, I’d be happy to submit a blog post to help get the ball rolling and can already think of a few topics, based upon how I use Emby now.

Does this idea have any merit? How many others would submit Sideshow posts, if such a blog competition existed? Thanks for considering... (that’s my circa 500 words used up). @sross44

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

I think this is an interesting idea but with almost no merit. I do NOT want to wade through pictures when i can read what is supposed to be portrayed much faster and with fewer comprehension errors than could ever be obtained by some picture show. 
The "idea" that "a picture is worth a thousand words" is absurd that was invented by "artists" to lazy or to inept to actually say what is meant. 

I strongly hope Emby does not waste the time and effort to create something based on images when just a few words does the same job both better and easier to understand. 

I could go on but I do not think it is necessary as the idea itself is self evidently flawed. 

[sross44 235]

We really do appreciate the ideas that you've been throwing around. I can see both merits and some negatives to this idea and it's something that we could potentially think about down the road. 

Right now we have a plan in place that may take a while, but we are doing things to grow our market share and get the Emby name out there. 

[bakes82 90]

Why not focus on other things like where is info from the QA you posted part 1 over a month ago and no follow up.  Like people aren't going to post about Emby on blogs when the UI looks like crap and Plex has greater device support and feature set, most people will do a comparison and well Emby loses on a lot of fronts there.  Hell, look at your their "blog" on the website it's not been updated since feb 2023, the one on the forums has multi month gaps.  What makes makes Emby enticing?  There aren't updates very often.

[bakes82 90]

10 hours ago, user24 said:

Someone could blog about their extensive Star Wars collection and how they have it well-organised within Emby

Plex would actually do this better because they support custom ordering of collections, so you could order the collection in proper timeline sequence, Emby you can't.

[user24 94]

@sross44(& team), thanks for the reply. If any of my suggestions are in any way useful to Emby, either now or in the future, then that's great. If not quite what you're looking for, then that's ok by me as well. Keep up the good work, it's appreciated!