Niche selection

CueTheScene has 31 niches today. Each one carries its own footage routing, voice biases, prompting fragments, and content-policy guardrails. Picking the right niche is more than a label, it tells the pipeline how to behave. This page covers the 31, what each is good for, and how to pick the closest match when nothing's a perfect fit.

What a niche actually does

The niche you pick affects four things behind the scenes:

Prompting fragment. Each niche has a hand-written paragraph that joins the script generator's system prompt. The history fragment nudges toward primary-source quotes. The true-crime fragment bans speculation about unconvicted suspects. The science fragment bans correlation-as-causation. The tutorial fragment enforces dependency ordering. None of this is visible on the brief form, all of it shapes the script.

Footage routing chain. The orchestrator's per-niche chain decides where to search for clips and in what order. History starts with archival (Library of Congress, National Archives, Internet Archive). Gaming starts with Pexels and Pixabay. Science blends NASA + Wikimedia + general stock. Picking the wrong niche routes the search through providers that don't have the right material.

Voice bias. Voices are tagged with niche fit. The voice recommender's first-tier picks for "history" are different from "true_crime" are different from "science". You can override, but the first-tier picks are usually correct.

Theme bias. The visual treatment, colour palette, title-card typography, lower-third style, defaults to one that suits the niche. Cinematic-dark for history, editorial-paper for literary analysis, archival-warm for cold-war pieces. Override on the brief form if needed.

The 31 niches

Grouped roughly by tier:

General / lifestyle

finance · tech · business · health · lifestyle · self_improvement · productivity · english_learning · senior_health · motivation · stoic_philosophy · psychology · nature

Pexels + Pixabay are the primary footage tier. Voice picks lean toward energetic-but-grounded narrators. Prompting fragments enforce professional caution on health and finance (no medical / investment advice claims).

History and archival

history · archival · wwii · cold_war · ancient

Archival is the primary tier (NARA, Library of Congress, Internet Archive, British Pathé, Wikimedia Commons). Voice picks lean grave and considered. Prompting fragments enforce primary-source preference and discourage speculation. Footage stills tier engaged (period photographs treated with Ken Burns motion, see Editor overview).

Military and defence

military · defence · nato

DVIDS (US military media) is the lead archival source, with NATO-archive supplement. Voice picks lean toward authoritative, sometimes formal. Prompting fragments enforce operational accuracy and discourage glorification.

European heritage

european_history · european_culture

Europeana is the lead archival source. Voice picks lean considered and cultured. Prompting fragments engage period-correct language.

Culture

culture

Global archival heritage. Smithsonian, world museums, broad Wikimedia coverage. Voice picks lean toward cultured and curious.

Science and space

science · space · astronomy

NASA Image and Video Library is the lead for space, science blends NASA + Wikimedia + Pexels. Voice picks lean toward wonder-and-rigour balance. Prompting fragments enforce hypothesis-as-fact discipline and ban pseudoscience.

True crime and literary

true_crime · mystery · literary_analysis · classical

Mixed sourcing depending on era. Voice picks lean toward gravitas without sensationalism. True-crime prompting fragment enforces defamation-safe framing and bans speculation about unconvicted suspects.

Picking the closest match

If your video doesn't quite fit any of the 31, pick the nearest and the pipeline will still produce a good video, just without the niche-specific lifts firing.

Heuristic: pick by what the script needs, not what the topic is.

• A video about the financial crash of 2008 told as a documentary: finance is the obvious pick, but history will give better narrative scaffolding because the script is structurally a historical event, not finance advice.
• A video about a Roman emperor's tax policy: ancient is obvious, but if the angle is policy-economics not history-narrative, finance is worth a try.
• A video about a NASA mission's funding battles: space is obvious, but business will know about congressional politics and budget cycles that space won't.

The closer you get to the niche the script structurally needs, the more of the niche-specific lifts will fire usefully.

Picking too specifically

The more specific niches (wwii, cold_war, ancient, nato) inherit from their parent niches but layer additional prompting + footage routing on top. Pick the specific one when the video really is about that era or theatre; pick the parent when the video spans eras or sits adjacent.

• A video about D-Day: pick wwii, not history. The WWII fragment knows about service-branch accuracy, period-correct German military terms, and the specific archival sources for the European theatre.
• A video about the broader 20th-century arc: pick history. The WWII fragment is too narrow.
• A video about NATO's founding in 1949: pick nato. The NATO archive is the source of truth.
• A video about the post-war reconstruction of Europe more generally: pick european_history.

What you can't currently do

Multilingual videos. The 31 niches are all English-language; the prompting fragments and voice catalogue are English-bias. Multilingual support is queued.

Live or current-news content. The pipeline isn't designed for "this just happened today" reactive content. The brief validator refuses live-news asks.

Niches not on the list. If your channel is in a genre we don't have a niche for (extreme sports, music criticism, beauty / fashion, sports analysis, gaming livestreams), the pipeline will still work using the nearest neighbour, but the niche-specific lifts won't apply. If the gap matters for your channel, drop a note to hello@cuethescene.com, the niche roadmap is partly driven by what creators ask for.

What's next

Brief writing strategy covers how the brief reads in the niche's context.

Format and length covers how the niche interacts with the format and length choice.

Editor overview covers the editor surfaces that surface niche-specific UI (search-more tier toggle, footage attribution chips, voice recommender ordering).

Cheers,
Carl