Availability and Saturation

Saturation is how full a face’s airtime already is over a stretch of time. CityScreen Context does not work it out; it asks the content management system, which is the only system that knows what is already scheduled to play.

This page is for owner and admin employees who want to know what the figure is and when it changes. There is nothing to configure per organization.

What the figure measures

For one face and one window of time, the source reports:

Window: A start time and a duration, giving the stretch of time the figure describes.
Available time: How much airtime the face has in that window.
Saturated time: How much of that airtime is already taken.
Saturation: The occupancy ratio itself.

Each face has a series of these windows covering the period CityScreen Context asked about.

CityScreen Deals defines saturation as a dashboard widget — an occupancy chart an operator looks at. What this page describes is the underlying signal for a single face, pulled from the content management system so that the platform can act on it. The two are the same quantity seen at different ends: see the glossary for the Deals term.

When it refreshes

Scheduled: Hourly.
After new faces appear: Immediately after a synchronization run that created faces, for just those new faces, so a face that appears mid-hour has a figure without waiting for the next scheduled pass.

The scheduled pass covers every organization whose synchronization settings are saved and enabled, and skips two kinds of organization: those whose inventory arrives as a file rather than from a live catalog, and those with no non-archived inventory at all.

Each refresh asks for a window running from the current moment forward, roughly the coming day. The stored figures describe the latest refresh and do not accumulate as a history.

Who reads it

The auction. When an ad request arrives for a face, that face’s current saturation feeds into the floor-price calculation for that request. The stored figures do not appear in the catalog, in reports or in what demand partners are told. Bid floors covers how a floor price is actually arrived at.

Availability is a different question

"Is this face available?" and "how saturated is this face?" are different questions, and it is worth keeping them apart.

Available to sell right now: A face is offered to demand partners when it is enabled, not archived, and belongs to an enabled organization. That is an activation question — see Activation and archiving.
Available to book ahead: When an automated guaranteed campaign is being priced or booked, the platform asks the content management system for saturation directly, over exactly the window being booked, rather than reading the stored hourly figures. The booking answer is therefore fresh and window-specific, and is not the same data as the figures described above — see Forecasting.

If the figures look wrong

Saturation is reported, not computed here, so a figure that does not match the operator’s expectation is a question for the content management system in almost every case.

Two platform-side reasons are worth ruling out first.

The organization’s inventory arrives as a file, in which case no saturation refresh runs at all.
All of the organization’s inventory is archived, in which case the scheduled pass skips the organization.