Welcome to Niche Video Media’s Private Media Channel. This tour will give you all the details you need to know to setup and use our private media channel. By now, you would have watched our promo video on our website and are ready to create, customize and start using your own private media channel.

Follow these simple steps and you will be on your way to sharing your videos in your channel in no time.

From our website, http://nichevid.com simply enter a name for your private media channel and click “Brand it and get started”. The name of your channel can be your company name or something unique that you’d like to call your media outlet

As soon as you sign up for your own channel, you will be taken to our launching page where the default plan for all new channels is our Intro plan, which is free for 30 days. Enter your personal details and the name you entered for your channel on the home page will be defaulted for your domain name, but it can be changed if needed. Click “Launch Me” and you’re ready to start using your new own private media channel.

As soon as you launch your channel, you will be taken to a page where you can start customizing your channel right away. This is one of the key elements that sets us apart from the rest of the competition. Using this feature, you can brand your channel to have the same look and feel of your own website. You can upload your Company Logo and it will be used on all of the pages of your channel that your subscribers see. Then, you can customize the channel header and background colors to match that of your website to make your viewers have the same user experience as they would on your site. If, at any time, you want to change it or go back to the default settings, simply click on the “Reset” icon and the color will default to the ones provided by NicheVid.com. Finally, you can preview your new channel branding before you decide to save it.

As soon as you sign up with NicheVid.com, you will have your own profile created. To edit this, click on the “My Profile” link on the top right corner of the page and you will be able to customize it with your own profile image and text. You can also add links to all of your favorite social media sites and set your local timezone so that all date and time information will use the time zone you’re in. The same goes for your default language as well (though, we currently only support English as the standard language).

Clicking on “Dashboard” on the top menu will take you to your main dashboard page. This is your main page from which you can monitor and control all of the activity on your channel. You will have quick access to any videos that need your attention, any communication that needs your moderation or simply view any comments that any of your channel users have entered about any of the video in your channel. You can also keep an eye on some key stats like total number of videos hosted and the total number of users on your channel.

The Console is your main command center. You can access this by clicking on “Console” on the top menu at any time. This page allows you to control every aspect of your channel, from basic site administration, to creating communities, users, roles, customizing the channel, uploading videos, managing who gets to upload videos and who gets to see it, etc. Let’s walk through each of the key areas of the console.

We realize that not all businesses use the same terminology when it comes to conducting business within their domains. So we allow you to customize the terms used within your channel. For instance, if your definition of “Community” is your “Company” or “School” or, in this example, your “Academy”, then enter that here once and every time we refer to community within your channel, we will replace that with the term you’ve entered here. You can define additional terms that apply to your community, like “Revenue” or “Major” under the “User Field” columns and they will show up under your community details page.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of our Private Media Channel. Under “Manage Users/Roles”, the first tab lets you define custom roles on top of the standard 3 roles (Site Admin, CEO and Referring Member) that come with the site. Having a custom role defined let’s you control the actions of your users who are assigned this role. For example, if you have your community setup so that you need to give some of your users the rights to upload and edit videos, but others to simply view them and maybe comment on them, you can do that easily by setting up 2 different roles, one for “Content Creator” and one for “Content Viewer”. Simply click on the “Add New Role” button on this page and set the permission levels for each of these roles. Later on in this tour, you can see how easy it is to assign your individual users to these particular roles, thereby automatically restricting them to doing certain tasks only.

With our fully customizable email templates and notification settings, you have the power to choose who gets what message and in what format. This can get a bit confusing at first, but the simple concept here is, you have the ability to select individual roles to get notified of certain events within the system. For example, the site admin may want to be notified every time a new video is uploaded by an authorized member of the community. You can simply do that by checking the box under “Upload Content Notification” against the “Site Admin” role. Similarly, you will want to notify all of your users when their passwords have been reset; this can be done by checking all of the roles under “Password Reset Notification”… it’s that easy!

But that’s not it… you can go one step further and customize each and every email template by role, by event type! We realize that this can get daunting at times, but the thing to keep in mind is that all of these different types of notifications already have a default, well-formed and informative email template created by default. The customization piece allows you to take it one step further and include/exclude other pieces of information that you think is pertinent for this particular role for a particular event type.

By clicking on a particular role under a particular event type, you will be taken to the screen above where you can change anything from the email subject to it’s content. The “Insert Field Code” allows you to insert a set of predefined codes (like “Content URL” or “User Email”, etc.) into specific places of the email message to provide more meaning to those messages. This way, you are in full control over any particular message that you want conveyed when some action takes place.

Now that you’ve created the roles that people will have in your community and the emails that each type will receive, it’s time to setup your users. Simply go to “Manage Users/Roles” from the Console and click on the second tab called “Users”. This page will allow you to view your current set of users, edit their information as well as add new users to your community. Simply click on the “Add New User” button and enter the basic details of your intended user. Once you’re done, the system let’s you send the newly created login and password information to your user via email. All they have to do is click on the link in the email, use their own email ID as the login ID and the password you’ve provided in the email. They can change their password as soon as they’ve logged in.

Now that you’ve setup your roles, it’s time to give them a place in your community. For this, go to “Manage Community” under the Console and click on the community you want to manage. You will see some basic information about the community in Step 1 and then under Step 2, you can search for any or all users within this community and set their role within the community by simply selecting one of the options from the drop down.

The final step in making sure all of your users have the right privileges and communication levels is to determine who can talk to whom and within which communities. Click on “Manage Users/Roles” from the Console and on the third tab called “Relationships”, you will be able to do just that. On the left you will see a list of all of your users within the community; you can even search for particular ones if your user list is too long. In the middle, you will be able to see which community this particular user belongs to and set the role for them. Finally, on the right, you will see a list of everyone else but this user and you can choose to allow direct communication between your first selected user and any other user(s) within your community by simply clicking the “Allowed” checkbox. By doing so, these 2 users can now communicate directly, without your moderation, about videos that are shared between them in their community.

Finally, we’re down the meat of the solution… the content. This is what it’s all about; uploading and sharing video-based information within the users of your community. To get started, simply go to the Console and click on the “Upload Content” link. You will be taken to the screen above where you will be able to pick a video to be uploaded, give it a title and description and even add tags to the video for easier searching. If you have multiple communities, then you can select which community this particular video belongs to. Click save and your video will be available to be approved shortly.

This is the final step before any video is made available for viewing on your channel. Whenever there’s a video that is uploaded by any user, including yourself, you will be notified via email that there’s a new video requiring approval. To do so, go to the Console’s “Manage Content” page and you will see a list of all of the videos in your channel. You can view the content of the video first and then choose to either “Approve”, “Reject”, “Edit” or “Delete” the content. Once you approve the video, then all of your community users who have the privilege to view this content will receive an email notification about the availability of this video and can simply log into the channel using their own login and view the content.

Once the community has been setup and some content uploaded, your subscribers can simply use the URL sent to them via email along with their username and password to log into the site and view the content that has been approved for them to watch. By simply going to their Dashboard and clicking on the video icon on the community page, they can view the content that has been uploaded and even comment on it. It’s that easy!

From the Console, you can access “My Account” anytime to view your current billing plan and change it if you’d like to upgrade to one of our higher plans with additional storage and views. You can also come to this page when you’re ready to move up from our free “Intro” plan and add your payment information, which is captured using secure protocols. If you’re already setup with one payment type, but would like to change it to another, this page allows you to do that as well.