Broadcast media companies experience similar challenges as other types of content businesses, from eCommerce to B2B organizations: telling the right stories to the right audiences, reaching customers where they’re engaging most, and driving transformation at a time when competition for attention and eyeballs is higher than ever before.
For broadcast media businesses, everything comes back to speed. It’s all about getting the best stories out first, and being able to quickly launch and test new digital experiences. For digital leads at public media companies, especially, managing a large technology stack to carry out these experiences is part of the job, and having a publishing platform that integrates seamlessly into solutions for audio and video, personalization, paywalls and more is critical.
In a recent blog post, we covered the key reasons public media is increasingly turning to content management, including to 1) increase speed and flexibility in publishing, 2) carry out multisite and omnichannel experiences, and 3) provide rich digital experiences through integrations. Here, we’ll take a deeper dive into some of those integrations, and the top ones Brightspot offers for broadcast media companies.
Digital-to-print
Many broadcast media companies operate in digital—like radio and television—and print spaces. This means efficiencies across digital-to-print publishing are critical in order to maintain consistent workflows and narratives, no matter where content is being released.
Brightspot’s digital-to-print integration capabilities treat print as simply another workflow, making tasks like editing, importing and maintaining version control achievable from the same system. L.A. Times’ editorial staff, for example, utilized Brightspot’s digital-to-print capabilities in order to better integrate with their print production system.
Persistent player
Radio broadcast companies today look to provide consistent experiences no matter where their listeners are engaging. The persistent player integration appeases disruption in listening as users switch from car radio to web to mobile, and provides a better overall listening experience.
A radio station with a web or app presence, for example, can use the persistent player integration so that users can continuously listen on the page as they also browse other parts of your website.
Transcription
One of the biggest benefits of transcription for broadcast media companies is the ability to boost SEO. With a full podcast transcription, for example, teams can identify and pull out topical keywords from the audio file, which can then be exposed to search algorithms and crawlers.
Beyond being time-consuming, transcription capabilities can also be a costly burden for media companies. Brightspot’s integration with Amazon Transcribe makes it easy for media companies to provide transcriptions for video and audio, saving time and money in manual transcription.
Premium & over-the-top (OTT) video services
Brightspot integrates with online video providers (OVPs) like Brightcove, Kaltura, Vimeo and YouTube. With bi-directional sync, editors can perform some tasks in Brightspot and have those changes reflected in the OVP as well.
Other OTT video features that make it easy for broadcast companies to manage their digital video assets from Brightspot include every device support, which allows videos to be displayed on desktop, mobile or TV, and in-line video editing to easily adjust video assets that, say, appeared on television first and need to be trimmed down or stylized for web. An additional powerful out-of-the-box tool is Brightspot’s patented companion content feature, which supports the inclusion of related assets and links directly within the video player timeline to augment the platform’s digital storytelling capabilities.
Public broadcaster WGBH is a strong example of a business that wanted to deliver an engaging, video-first digital experience to its audiences, and was able to do so with Brightspot. As the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, WGBH’s video repository included everything from PBS shows to the latest news stories from NPR. The broadcaster needed a CMS solution with rich video integration capabilities to bring a strong digital experience to life across platforms, and turned to Brightspot to make it happen.
Paywalls
Public media companies operating digitally today often leverage paywalls to monetize the content they put out on the Internet, radio and OTT services. CMS integrations with services to handle transactions will support emerging revenue streams and business models, including offering the flexibility to leverage different types of paywall systems, like basic, metered or dynamic paywalls.
Marketing tools
To leverage their broad viewer and listener bases, broadcast media companies can extend the reach of and engagement with their content with marketing integrations. These integrations simplify things like sending newsletters, notifications and alerts.
Brightspot offers a number of different marketing integrations, including Cheetahmail and MailChimp to manage and send newsletters within the CMS, as well as AWS SES and Mailgun, which both allow media publishers to email their audiences confirmation letters, notifications and more.
Audience segmentation and personalization
Brightspot’s audience segmentation and personalization features allow media companies to tailor content to different target personas through integrations with external customer data platforms (CDPs). One variation of a homepage can be delivered to one audience, for example, while a separate homepage variation featuring different tailored content can appear to another.
Brightspot also offers out-of-the-box audience targets – including a tagged content view count target and device category target – meaning less reliance on IT teams to get started in setting up these personalization parameters.
In addition to creating content variations and aligning content to audience targets, Brightspot offers A/B testing, which is the ability to track the performance of an original content (such as a promo) versus its variants. Also, in order to deliver more sophisticated personalization features in 2021, Brightspot is partnering with a leading customer data platform that will allow CMS users to create and leverage custom audience segments, deliver AI-driven content recommendations, and create 1:1 personalized experiences on the web and other channels. Contact us via the form below to get more information!
