Customer Profile

Viacom, a leading media conglomerate with an extensive portfolio of cable TV and film production assets. Its MTV Networks unit runs such cable networks as Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and the family of MTV channels (MTV, MTV2, VH1).

Challenge

Content re-distribution is an important aspect of balanced online presence strategy. Content feeds leverage digital assets by increasing exposure through syndication, online search optimization, and standardization of content delivery channels.

Deploying the toolkit of processes and systems to support the production of feeds for more than a hundred of branded sources is a multi-faceted challenge:

• Maintain the right balance between the market response time and benefits of centralized feed management
• Enhance the post-merger integration process to accelerate the deployment of acquired assets through rapid content integration
• Gather economies of scale efficiencies through content management standardization
• Decrease costs by outsourcing non-value-add production activities
• Leverage open-source systems to improve solution effectiveness

Approach

Upgrade the distribution platform to centralize the management of online content feed production:

• Re-engineer the process of content feed development to streamline operating procedures
• Consolidate the gamut of existing content feed generation systems into a shared service
• Modularize feed deployments to increase reusability across brands
• Create graphical interfaces to empower users with feed management capabilities
• Use global delivery to facilitate outsourced feed production

Results

Customized Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) implementation dramatically simplified the interaction between the content production and the platform services groups. Centralized system increased the portability of feed deployments and improved major operating efficiency metrics:

• Reduced system management and maintenance costs through consolidation of development and production functions
• Reduced time-to-market for online feed creation and modification requests
• Improved quality by enabling comprehensive feed production management