CBC Case Study

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation wanted an on-demand video and audio portal for broadcast TV, film clips, and webisodes from numerous Canadian and global content producers. They had 2000+ hours of audio and video to organize and manage for properties http://www.cbc.ca/video/ and http://www.cbc.ca/radio/.

Their goals included increasing their web audience and creating a unified look and feel.

Their content

CBC has short- and long-form news, radio, video, sports highlights, and streaming audio.

Challenges

  • CBC had to migrate from their current system and relaunch from scratch in about 6-8 weeks.
  • Producers wanted individual players on their own unit pages, so media had to be centralized.
  • The previous vendor’s technology wasn’t open. Player creation was difficult, and they had to send the video to the vendor for upload, delaying publishing.
  • Without an open system, integration with a social media service was difficult.
  • All players were hosted by and scattered across the vendor’s servers, which would often shut down.
  • For advertising, they needed pre-roll, mid-rolls, chapter breaks, and companion boxes.

Solution


Players

  • Using thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) 4.1.2, CBC created players with greater performance and a better user experience:
  • Editors use a “featured” category to create a list of highlighted content.
  • To continually update the “most recent” and “most watched” lists, they make calls to our Feeds Service.
  • A program guide feed supplies video and audio metadata.
  • Viewers can create personal playlists.
  • Keyword fields and a “related IDs” field populate the user-defined “related” category of content pulled every hour or so from a Feeds Service call to Google.

Account structure and ingest

  • For CBC, convenience is more important than control. Editors and producers can easily upload and manage content, individual permissions are used to further refine administrative tasks.
  • Each unit gets a FlipFactory account to upload content.
  • Producers use our Ingest Service Watch Folders for breaking live news.
  • They upload their content to their accounts via FTP.
  • Content libraries are populated from the Feeds Service with Java Scripts.

Integrations

  • They continued using DoubleClick for ad serving, and added partner Ominture for analytics.

Results

Within 60 days, Radio-Canada had set up an account in thePlatform’s system, added content, and developed and launched a beta video portal. Their audience has access to a constantly updated video library in a searchable, user-friendly portal.