Concepts

ChannelForge uses a small set of words for its parts, and the app uses them the same way on every page. Read this once and the rest of the documentation — and the app — will read easily.

How the parts fit together#

workspace ── members and roles, teams, connected accounts, credits, billing
   │
   └── project (a brief) ── niche proposals
          │
          └── channel ── kit (its renderer) · brand suite · narrator · topic backlog · schedule
                 │
                 └── episode ── checked by the quality gates and the critic
                        │
                        └── posts, one per platform ──▶ Insights and Studio read how they do

Every piece of work in that picture — researching niches, building a kit, making an episode, posting it — is a job, and every job that costs us money is paid for in credits.

Workspace#

The top-level container. A workspace holds its projects and channels, the platform accounts it has connected, its members and teams, its credits and its plan. Credits, limits and billing belong to the workspace, never to a person. You can belong to several workspaces and switch between them at the top of the sidebar.

Each member has a role in the workspace:

Owners and admins see every project. Editors and viewers see the projects open to the whole workspace and those of their teams; see Workspaces, projects, teams and roles.

Project#

A brief and the channels built from it. When you create a project, ChannelForge researches niches for the brief and scores each one honestly; you draft channels from the niches you like. A project also sets the language its channels are researched, written and narrated in. Pausing a project stops every one of its channels from generating and posting until you resume it. See Niche research.

Channel#

One faceless channel: its name and handles, its narrator, its palette, the places its episodes rotate through, its kit, its brand suite, its topic backlog and its schedule. A channel posts through the platform accounts you link to it. Its state badge reads:

A channel whose schedule was switched on while it was Branding starts posting once its brand suite is built; its badge then reads Ready until the schedule is next saved.

The row of step chips at the top of a channel's page — Identity, Kit, Brand, First episode, Live — shows how far its setup has come. See Channels and kits.

Format#

One of eight proven formats: How machines work, Space, to scale, What if…?, Oddly satisfying physics, Journeys into the deep, Be there in history, What happens to your body and Illusions and brain teasers. A channel started from a format gets a renamed copy of a renderer that is already built and tested, so it skips the kit build, and it still gets its own name, handles and colour look, and a narrator you can change. See Proven formats.

Kit#

A channel's own renderer: the engine that draws its scenes in real-time 3D and 2D, its episode template, its style gallery and a reference episode. Every episode of the channel is drawn with its kit, which is why a channel looks like itself. A kit is built once per channel by an agent on our GPUs (the app estimates 45 to 120 minutes), or copied from a format. Improve the kit on the channel page runs another round on it later.

Brand suite#

The channel's logo, banners, covers, highlight covers and watermark in every size each platform asks for, rendered with its kit, plus the words to set the channel up: names, bios, descriptions, first posts and hashtags, with a step-by-step checklist and a ZIP of everything. See Brand suites.

Topic and backlog#

A topic is one planned episode: a title, a hook, an angle, the key facts with their sources, and the consequences to show. A channel keeps a backlog of unused topics. Topics come from the channel's research, and later from your viewers' comments, breakouts, the outlier radar and your own ideas. The first topics are planned automatically before the first episode; Plan 12 more on the channel page adds a dozen.

Episode#

One finished video and everything needed to post it. A short is narrated, 120 to 175 seconds long and vertical, with all its text in one band, and comes with a shorter edit for Facebook and Instagram, a thumbnail, a title, a description, tags and hashtags, and its quality report. Episodes come in four kinds:

Films — original 6 to 10 minute 16:9 videos — are made and kept apart from episodes, under Long-form. See Long-form films.

An episode appears once it is made and checked. Its state:

While an episode is being made, it is a job, not an episode yet. A job that fails makes no episode: it shows as failed in Activity, and nothing is charged for a failure on our side.

The library#

Every episode your workspace has made: Episodes in the sidebar, with tabs for All, Ready, Published, Held and Failed, and a filter by channel. An episode reaches the library only once its checks are done — ready, or held with the reasons — so the Failed tab stays empty; failed jobs are in Activity.

Quality gates and the critic#

Before an episode reaches the library, automated gates measure it — picture, sound, pace, captions, flashes, units, variety, originality and more — and an independent critic, a separate review that did not write the episode, scores it for craft, facts, platform policy and entertainment. An episode that falls short goes back for a fix round; one that still falls short is held and not charged. See The quality gates and the critic.

Job#

One piece of work: Research niches, Draft a channel, Build the channel kit, Generate an episode, Publish and many more. A job is queued, then running, and ends succeeded, failed or cancelled. Activity in the sidebar lists the jobs started by you, your team, your setups and your schedules, each with its live log. The work that runs by itself in the background — reading your accounts, learning from them, the weekly coach brief and comment themes — is left out of it. GPU jobs wait their turn in a shared queue: your plan sets how many run at once and how high they stand in it.

A job you cancel before it starts costs nothing. One you cancel while it runs stops at its next checkpoint and pays for the work it did. Run again on a failed or cancelled job's page starts a new one.

Credit, hold and settle#

A credit is $0.10 of list value. A job is charged from what it really cost — model calls, narration, GPU time — at your plan's rate, so a light job costs less than a heavy one.

 start ──▶ hold: the job reserves credits (and does not start without them)
            │
            ▼
 end ────▶ settle: charged what it really used; the rest comes back at once
            │
            └─ failed on our side, held by its checks, cancelled before it started: nothing charged

Before you start any paid job, its price is beside the button: what jobs like it typically cost, and what it reserves. See Credits and plans.

Approvals#

A channel can ask for approval before each episode posts. Its ready episodes then wait in Approvals — a deck you swipe through on your phone — and its schedule posts only what someone approved. A morning email lists what is waiting. See Approvals on your phone.

Schedule and slots#

A channel's schedule is its posting times — slots — in its own time zone, the platforms each slot posts to, how many new episodes it makes a day and how many it keeps ready. At each slot it posts, to each platform, the oldest ready episode that platform has not had. A slot is handled once: one missed while our systems were down is not made up later. See Schedules and autopilot.

Autopilot#

The one-click setup on the start page: it takes a channel from nothing to its first episodes — identity and look (or niche research, a draft and a kit), the first episode, the brand suite and two more episodes — step by step, reserving each step's credits as it starts, and emails you when the first episode is ready. After that, the channel's schedule keeps it posting and supplied by itself, at the pace you set with New episodes a day and Keep ready.

Studio#

Everything your workspace has published, on every account it connected — each video and post, its numbers over time and its comments — in one place, with sections for the library, the inbox, optimising, thumbnails, the changes made and the health of each connection. Reading is on Creator and above; replying and changing posts on Pro and above. See Studio: one inbox for every comment.

Insights#

What your audience did with each post, measured from your own connected accounts and tested by code inside each channel, with how sure each answer is. Insights also feeds the weekly coach, retention learning and breakout follow-ups. It is on Creator and above. See Insights.

Related#

• Quick start — these ideas in order, from sign-up to a first episode
• A tour of your workspace — where each of them lives in the app
• Glossary — every term, A to Z