Move anything: exporting and importing shows and channels

Sometimes content has to move — to a client’s workspace, between a staging and a live account, or just as a backup you can trust. ChannelOS handles this with one portable bundle format: a show downloads as .show.channelos.tv and a channel as .channel.channelos.tv. Same engine underneath, one extension per kind so you can tell at a glance what’s inside.

What a ChannelOS bundle actually is

It’s a ZIP with everything the content needs to stand on its own:

• A manifest (manifest.json) recording the format, what kind of bundle it is, and a SHA-256 integrity check.
• The entities — the show, or the channel plus every show it airs.
• A media folder with every referenced image, video and audio file, frozen as bytes and content-addressed by hash (so the same photo used on five slides is stored once).
• The brand kits those shows depend on.

Because the media is baked in and there are no remote URLs, the file works offline and in any workspace. Nothing can rot.

Export a show

Go to Shows (/shows), open a show card’s three-dot menu, and choose Export…. You get a <name>.show.channelos.tv file (named after the show) containing the show, its brand kit, and all of its media.

Import a show

On the Shows page, click Import show (top-right), pick a .show.channelos.tv file, and ChannelOS:

1. Unpacks the ZIP and validates the manifest and integrity.
2. Creates a new show with a new ID — never overwriting an existing one.
3. Re-uploads the media into your workspace’s store, skipping anything outside the safe type whitelist.
4. Recreates the brand kit as a fresh entity.

On success you get a Show imported toast and land in the editor, ready to use it. If any media was skipped, the toast says how many.

Export a channel — schedule and all

A channel is more than a list — it’s a plan. So Export… from a channel row’s menu produces a <name>.channel.channelos.tv that carries:

• The channel itself: name, aspect, color, default show.
• The full schedule — every program with its times, recurring weekdays and date ranges, plus any live takeover.
• Every show the channel airs — default, scheduled and overlay.
• All media for those shows (deduplicated across the whole bundle) and their brand kits.

One file, the entire broadcast plan.

Import a channel

On Channels, click Import channel, pick the file, and ChannelOS rebuilds the whole thing: a new channel with new show IDs, the schedule remapped onto those new shows, media re-uploaded, brand kits recreated. The success toast reports how many shows came across. The result is a working channel on its timeline — schedule intact — with no dependency on where it came from.

Why it’s safe to do often

Three properties make this boring in the best way:

• New IDs on every import — nothing collides, nothing is overwritten, and you can import the same file as many times as you like.
• Content-addressed media — duplicates are stored once and verified by hash, so big bundles stay lean and provably intact.
• A type whitelist — only known-safe media is accepted on import, so a file from an untrusted source can’t smuggle anything in.

Export to hand a finished channel to a client, to snapshot before a big change, or to clone a proven setup into a new location. The file is the whole thing — pick it up, drop it anywhere, and it just runs.