Second Screen.
A distinct state the whole site enters while a series is in its broadcast window. Eight things change, they change everywhere at once, and they change back on their own.
The state, as the site sees it.
Second Screen is driven by a feed rather than by somebody remembering to switch it on. When the window opens the site changes; when it closes it changes back.
Watching the wheat
Harvest is coming
- Series window Closed — next opens with series six chapters.window5 min
- Chapter of the week None — out of window chapters.current5 min
- Live broadcast Harvest Live, 3 September, 19:00 broadcasting.next60 s
- Second Screen Inactive state.secondscreen30 s
- Weather at OX7 Feed placeholder metoffice.ox730 min
20°C at the farm shop, and dry for now
Winter barley running at 4.1 tonnes the hectare
Chapter 41 is open. Forty came before it
In this demonstration build every feed above is a seeded placeholder. The names are the ones a live build would read from.
The eight things that change.
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A chapter of the week appears at the top of every page.
Not a banner advertisement for the programme — the actual chapter page, numbered, with its naming operation and its place in the ledger. It changes on the morning after transmission.
The chapter, not a trailer for the chapter.
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The shop reorders itself around what was on screen.
If an episode featured the mushrooms, the mushrooms move up. This is the single most commercially valuable thing on this list and it is also the one most likely to be done crassly, so it is limited to reordering rather than to shouting.
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Stock states get more honest, not less.
Demand spikes hard in the two hours after transmission. Cleaned Out appears faster, restock dates appear where they are known, and the waiting list opens rather than the page pretending.
A spike is when a stock page most needs to tell the truth, and when it is most tempting not to.
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Nattering opens a room per chapter.
One thread per chapter, opened on transmission and closed a fortnight later. Parishes run watch-alongs and about forty per cent of them do.
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The cameras get promoted.
Whatever field or shed was on screen gets its camera surfaced, because the most common question in the two days after an episode is what that place looks like now.
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Broadcasting schedules nothing against it.
No live event runs inside a transmission window. Competing with the thing that brought everybody here is a peculiar way to run a platform.
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Nagging gets quieter, not louder.
The notification cap tightens during the window rather than loosening. It is the moment the temptation to send more is strongest and the moment it would do the most damage.
The frequency cap goes down in the window. That is the whole philosophy in one setting.
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And a small banner says the site is in this state.
Dismissible, once, permanently. A site that changes its behaviour without telling anybody is a site behaving oddly for no visible reason.
How the state is entered and left.
Trigger
- Entered by
- A published transmission dateNot a person clicking a switch.
- Window
- First transmission to two weeks after the lastTypically about six weeks.
- Left by
- The same feedAutomatically, with no manual step.
- Override
- Possible, loggedUsed once, for a delayed episode.
Scope
- Pages affected
- All of themIt is a site state, not a section.
- Things changed
- 8Listed above, all of them reversible.
- Notification behaviour
- Cap tightenedFrom one a day to one every three days.
- Live events scheduled inside it
- NoneBy rule.
Second Screen would be the fifteenth named state on this platform. The other fourteen — Loading, Fallowing, Cleaned Out, Breaking Down and the rest — are documented in Lawyering.
Why a state rather than a campaign.
The obvious way to handle a series airing is a campaign: a landing page, a countdown, a set of banners, and a marketing calendar that somebody has to execute for six weeks.
A state is different. It is a condition the site is in, driven by a feed, affecting every page, entered and left without anybody doing anything. Nobody has to remember to turn it off, which is the failure mode of every campaign ever run.
It also means the behaviour is describable in advance, on a page like this one, rather than being whatever the agency did that year.
Nobody has to remember to turn a state off. That is the whole advantage.
Eight changes
All reversible, all automatic.
Fewer notifications
The cap tightens in the window.
Nothing scheduled against it
By rule.
A dismissible banner
Because a site behaving differently should say so.
The other fourteen states.
Loading, Fallowing, Cleaned Out, Breaking Down and the rest, all built as real pages.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
No. This is an unsolicited third-party demonstration build, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the businesses it describes.
Public filings, published rankings and press reporting, each labelled on the page as a verified record, a founder claim or a third-party estimate.
