In the year 2018, Mathrubhumi, one of the leading newspapers in Kerala, with more than 15 lakh readers and equally strong online viewership approached RGB Broadcasting for a major workflow upgrade project. This decision was made by Mathrubhumi to overcome current workflow challenges and improve user-experiences on its online channel. What are the challenges faced by Mathrubhumi? How did RGB Broadcasting help Mathrubhumi enter into the new era of broadcasting journalism? This post offers an insight on the project, challenges faced by the client, technologies implemented and so on.
A Brief Introduction to Mathrubhumi Digital
Mathrubhumi Digital is an online initiative of Mathrubhumi, which is the second-largest media group in India after Manorama. Mathrubhumi News was launched in 2013 and today enjoys a massive following across India, among Malayali audience. Headquartered in Kozhikode, Mathrubhumi is today published from 10 locations across Kerala, 4 locations outside Kerala, and 2 locations outside India. Mathrubhumi followers can read or access the news online at https://tv.mathrubhumi.com/ or https://www.mathrubhumi.com/.
Broadcasting Challenges Faced by Mathrubhumi Digital
- In the years between 2013 to 2018, Mathrubhumi used YouTube to stream their content online.
- Like many other media and broadcasters, Mathrubhumi has opted for revenue sharing with YouTube, where YouTube incentivizes content creators for popular videos.
- By observing the trends over the years, Mathrubhumi found that revenue generation was lower compared to the views. This inspired them to start a private video platform.
- Managing various advertising platforms was another challenge faced by the digital media team at Mathrubhumi.
RGBs Scope of Work for Mathrubhumi Digital Upgrade Project
RGB Broadcasting was chosen by Mathrubhumi based on their prior project experience. Being a key system integrator for the project, RGB’s scope of work included the following:
- Replacing the existing workflow without disturbing the traffic and revenues
- Offering technical support and fixing bugs in the project
- Working within deadlines to meet the project objectives
RGB’s Timeline of Mathrubhumi Digital Upgrade Project
The project duration was 35 days. However, it went through the following phases.
- The team at RGB Broadcasting worked closely with Mathrubhumi to identify the fittest solution that not only offered the best value for investment but also helped them augment their viewer experiences.
- RGB helped them identify the areas that would potentially help them augmenttheir advertisement revenues.
- All the social media accounts were integrated on a single platform, which allowed the team to manage their social media accounts easily.
- Along with it, the team at RGB focused on modification of the player designs, which would match the current theme of Mathrubhumi.
- The team also supported Mathrubhumi after the implementation by offering unlimited technical support.
- The project implementation and testing was completed in 560 hours with 2 engineers.
Gain an Overview of Technology Investments in Project
As a part of the project, RGB Broadcasting employed the following technologies:
- Brightcove Video Cloud: It is one of the most popular online video player and video hosting platform. This video cloud allows broadcasters to present videos with clarity and assures superior viewing experiences. Brightcove Video Cloud offers the most complete toolsets including CDN bandwidth and storage,
encoding, and video streams. - Atex Polopoly: It is a popular content management system (CMS), which is widely used by media publishers and broadcasters. The CMS supports various types of content including articles, videos, and galleries. Atex Polopoly assures flexible workflow models, which makes cross-media publishing easy. It is equipped with an advanced Solr-based search engine.
Benefits of Mathrubhumi Digital Upgrade
With this upgrade project, Mathrubhumi has benefitted in the following ways.
- Mathrubhumi Digital is one of the most visited online portals for daily updates and news.
- The digital platform can be easily accessed from various devices such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and other smart devices.
- The online portal offers brilliant visual experiences to viewers accessing it from different platforms.
- Brightcove Video Cloud is scalable and can handle all types of videos effortlessly. Thus, viewers can now view news easily on the online portal with the same clarity as on television.
- Brightcove Video Cloud supports best-in-class video integrations, which has helped the Mathrubhumi team to integrate advertisement management, ad serving, marketing automation management and audience measurement on
one platform. - The migration to a new platform has helped minimize downtime while accelerating the rate of uploading.
Mathrubhumi takes pride in the fact that this technology investment has helped it compete with many international broadcasters like BBC and Sony Picture Network that has been using them for several years. You can get in touch with the team at RGB Broadcasting for more information on the project.
