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Educational Courses and Exercise Videos Now Allowed

August 11, 2020

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been a death sentence for many industries, a few of them — ones that are well-suited for at-home enjoyment — have the quarantine to thank for a surge in business.

According to Adobe's first-ever Digital Economy Index, orders for fitness equipment have seen a 55% boost in online sales. And Udemy, a leading online course provider, has seen a 425% increase in enrollments worldwide since shelter-in-place orders took effect in late February.

With this has come the production and consumption of more and more video content focusing on these two areas — and a wider offering of this content as well. So, we've decided to start allowing these two new types of content on TheTVDB: educational courses and exercise videos.

Below, you’ll find the guidelines for adding these new video formats, as well as some specific examples of each.

Educational Content

Educational content should only be added if it was originally released as a series with structured episodes. One rule of thumb is that if it's pay-per-video content, or if the content is promotional in any way, it is not allowed.

Educational content should always be added as series, with the company/provider of the content in the network field. We've added The Great Courses and MaterClass as networks to enable tagging to start. If you need another course provider added as a network, please let us know in the forums. Educational content should also be tagged with the Educational Content sub-genre tag.

The waters get muddy when educational content originally airs on YouTube. Because at that point the series would be considered a web series. Please check our web series guidelines for adding these.

Some guidelines for our current educational course providers:

MasterClass

  • Since individuals may host more than one MasterClass, we would prefer that all of a single person's MasterClasses are grouped into one series record, and titled "Person Name MasterClass." An example is Gordon Ramsay, who offers two cooking courses. In this case, we'd name the series "Gordon Ramsay MasterClass" and each season would represent each course.
  • Seasons should be named as the course is named on the MasterClass site. For the Gordon Ramsay example, the seasons would be:
    • Season 1: "Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking I"
    • Season 2: "Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking II"
  • Episodes should correspond to each video lesson in the course. Special videos that aren't specific lectures should be added to the specials season.

The Great Courses

  • Courses on The Great Courses should be added as series, with the series title being the title of the course.
  • Within the aired order, each video lesson should be considered one episode and titled to match The Great Courses website.


Exercise Videos

Exercise videos are now allowed, as long as they follow the guidelines below:

If content does not meet these standards specified above, it should not be added to TheTVDB.

An example of something that should NOT be added is P90X. It doesn't have the season/episode structure needed for a series record, nor is it a single standalone video that could be stored as a movie. Please do not add other exercise programs that are similar to the structure of P90X.