Matinee builds a release calendar out of a catalogue of finished titles, against rules you write down — so a series is spaced, a theme is not repeated twice running, and the month after a heavy week is not empty.
Nothing opens in this browser — this one takes a job and does the work on our own graphics cards in Oregon. The free allowance below is how you try it: 60 titles, no card and no payment, on the key you are issued.
It asks which weekdays you already release on. There is no default, and a job with no weekday is refused rather than scheduled on a guess.
The problem
Finished titles sit in a folder and go out when somebody remembers. Three parts of one shoot land in the same week because they finished together, then nothing goes out for a month, and the audience that showed up for part one has gone by part three. The pacing problem is obvious in hindsight and invisible while it is happening.
The rules are yours and they are on the page: minimum gap inside a series, how often a theme may repeat, how many titles a week, which weeks are blacked out. A calendar nobody can read is a calendar nobody can argue with.
Matinee will not tell you the best day or hour to post. That claim is sold everywhere and rests on somebody else's audience, not yours.
A job with no weekday stated is refused before anything runs. There is no default weekday, because a default here silently invents a release schedule for your business.
Every other calendar tool has a default — Tuesday and Friday, or whatever the blog post said. That default is a guess about your audience dressed up as a feature. Matinee asks, has no fallback, and stops. The thirty seconds it costs you is the difference between a calendar built on your business and one built on an article somebody wrote about a different one.
How it works
Which weekdays, how many a week, the minimum gap between parts of a series, how soon a theme may come round again, and which weeks are out. Plain fields, no scripting.
What is ready to go, with series, theme and runtime where you have them. Nothing unfinished — Matinee schedules what exists, not what you hope to shoot.
A date per title, every rule that bound it named on the row, and a list of the rules that could not all be satisfied where that happened — rather than a calendar that quietly broke one.
What it will never do
Scheduling advice is the most over-claimed category in creator software. Matinee's value is that it does the spacing arithmetic and stops there.
Pricing
A pack is credit against titles placed on a calendar, and every key starts with 60 of them free. Re-running the same catalogue with different rules charges only the titles it places, and most people run it two or three times before they like the shape — so do the arguing inside the free sixty.
A quarter of releases, or one series, scheduled properly.
A year or more of releases planned at once.
A full archive paced out deliberately.
Flat per title scheduled. Nothing here is priced against what a release earns on the day it goes out. Your licence key is emailed to you within two working days of payment.
Checkout is our own bitcoin server, not a card processor. The units you buy are added to your key: buy from the Buy more box inside the program and they arrive on their own once the payment confirms, or buy here and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that box.
Questions
Because it does not know your audience, and neither does anybody selling you a posting time.
The engagement charts in circulation are aggregates across platforms and genres. Your own store's history is the only honest source for that question, and it is a question for a different kind of program.
The calendar comes back with the conflict named on the row and both rules quoted.
Most contradictions are simple once you see them — a two-week series gap and four parts and a six-week window do not fit, and the fix is a decision rather than a calculation.
Yes. Blacked-out weeks are one of the rules, and a title can be pinned to a window.
What it will not do is invent a seasonal strategy. If you want holiday titles in December, say December.
No. The grouping work runs on Tower 1's own graphics cards in Oregon and the scheduling arithmetic runs in Python beside it.
A key. One line of text, issued to you and shown exactly once — only its hash is kept here, so it cannot be looked up later and we could not tell you what yours is. Every key arrives with a free allowance already on it, which is the tier at the top of the pricing above, and the work starts the first time you send a job with that key on it.
Each job is metered in the unit named in the pricing, and a unit that fails — a file that will not read, a row the model held back — is not charged and is named in the job report rather than silently skipped. When an allowance runs out the next job is refused before any work starts, with the number it used printed on the refusal.
More units are bought in bitcoin. The checkout is a bitcoin server we run ourselves. Buy from the Buy more box inside the program and the units are added to your key on their own as soon as the payment confirms; buy from the plan buttons above and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that same box. Each payment adds its units once, to one key.
Most people write three rules, run their last year through it, and find that they already broke all three. That comparison is worth the trial pack on its own.