Terms you will come across while managing your content, audience, and earnings on Third Coast TV.
Platform structure
Organization: Your top-level account. It holds your shows, episodes, team members, subscription tiers, and earnings.
Show: A series or channel inside your organization. An organization can have more than one show, and each can have its own branding.
Episode: A single piece of content, either an uploaded video or a recording of a live broadcast. Episodes belong to a show.
Season: An optional way to group related episodes within a show, usually numbered.
Control dashboard: The creator area where you manage content, settings, monetization, and analytics.
Content and publishing
VOD (video on demand): Pre-recorded content that viewers can watch any time. Includes uploads and recordings of past live broadcasts.
Draft: An episode you are still working on. It stays private until you publish it.
Published: An episode that is live and visible to its intended audience.
Scheduled publishing: Setting a future date and time for an episode to publish automatically.
Thumbnail: The preview image for an episode. You can upload your own.
Tag: A keyword you add to an episode to help organize and group content.
Markdown: The lightweight formatting used in descriptions. It supports bold, italic, links, and lists.
Access modes
Each episode has one or more access modes that decide who can watch it.
Public: Anyone can watch, no account needed.
Unlisted: Watchable by anyone with the link, but not shown in your public listings.
Subscriber: Requires an active subscription.
Tier-gated: Requires a specific subscription tier.
Perk-gated: Requires a specific perk.
Purchase: Requires a one-time purchase or rental of that episode.
Purchase or subscriber: Free for subscribers, or available to buy or rent for everyone else.
Live streaming
Live input: Your reusable streaming connection. It has a server address and a stream key that stay the same for every broadcast. There is one per organization rather than one per episode.
Stream key: The secret credential your streaming software uses to broadcast. Keep it private, since anyone who has it can stream to your channel.
RTMPS: The encrypted protocol most streaming software uses to send your live video to the platform.
OBS: Open Broadcaster Software, a free and widely used streaming application. Streamlabs and vMix are common alternatives.
Encoder: The software or hardware that compresses your video for streaming. x264 is a common software encoder; NVENC, AMF, and Apple VT are common hardware encoders.
Bitrate: How much data per second your stream uses, measured in kbps or Mbps. Higher bitrate looks better but needs more upload speed.
CBR (constant bitrate): An encoder mode that holds a steady bitrate. Recommended for live streaming.
Keyframe interval: How often a full frame is sent, measured in seconds. A 2-second interval is the usual choice for streaming.
Stream health: Dashboard indicators showing whether your connection is stable during a broadcast.
Dropped frames: Frames your encoder could not send in time, usually from limited upload bandwidth or an overloaded computer. They show up as stutter to viewers.
Restreaming (simulcast): Broadcasting to other platforms at the same time as Third Coast TV. Supported destinations include YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Kick, and TikTok, plus a custom RTMP destination for anything else.
Video and playback
Adaptive streaming: Delivering several quality levels of a video so viewers on slower connections automatically get a version that plays smoothly.
Transcoding: Converting your upload or recording into multiple quality levels for adaptive streaming.
Resolution: The pixel dimensions of your video, such as 1080p or 720p. Higher resolution shows more detail but needs more bitrate.
Frame rate (fps): How many images per second the video shows.
Monetization
Subscription tier: A recurring membership you offer, with its own price and benefits. You can define more than one tier.
Perk: An add-on benefit tied to a subscription.
Episode purchase: A one-time payment for access to a single episode, including paid live broadcasts.
Give Coins: A one-time gift of coins a viewer sends you. You can rename this action on your pages; the default label is « Give Coins ».
Gift subscription: A subscription one viewer buys on behalf of another.
Coins: The platform’s virtual currency used for coin gifts. One coin equals one US cent.
Platform fee: The platform’s cut of audience revenue, which is 8 percent. Your earnings are recorded as gross, fee, and net.
Net earnings: Your share of revenue after the platform fee. This is the amount paid out to you.
Payout: A transfer of your net earnings to your connected bank account.
Analytics
View (qualified view): A play that clears a watch threshold. Short clips need close to a full first 30 seconds, and the required share of the video eases down for longer content. The threshold is based on continuous watch time.
Watch time: Total minutes watched by your audience.
Retention curve: A graph of how many of the viewers who started an episode are still watching at each point in the video.
Interest graph: A view of the moments viewers seek to, combining rewinds and skips, with rewinds weighted more heavily.
Drop-off point: A moment where a meaningful share of viewers leave within a short span. Shows up as a sharp decline in the retention curve.
Geography breakdown: Watch time grouped by country.
Storage usage: How much of your video library you are storing, shown against your plan’s limits.
Team roles
Members of your organization hold one of three roles.
Owner: Full control of the organization, including billing and team management.
Operator: Manages content and day-to-day operations.
Member: A team member with limited access.
Content ratings and descriptors
Content rating: An age-appropriateness label for a show or episode. The ratings are Y (all children), Y7 (older children), G (general), PG (parental guidance), 14 (ages 14 and up), MA (mature), R (restricted), and X (adults only).
Content descriptors: Short codes that flag specific content: D (dialogue), L (language), S (sexual content), N (nudity), V (violence), and FV (fantasy violence).
Plans
Third Coast TV offers five plans: Free, Starter, Standard, Pro, and Streamer. Each includes different limits for storage, delivery, live inputs, and simultaneous streams. For current pricing and what each plan includes, see https://thirdcoast.tv/pricing.