Transcript: Creating Efficient Content Workflows for Broadcasters from NAB Show 2023

Michael Holland: All right, we’re going to get started. My name is Michael Holland. I’m the Vice President of Product at Arc XP, and with me is Joe Croney.

Joe Croney: Good afternoon. It’s great to be back at NAB again. It’s probably my 10th or 11th time here. And today we’re going to be talking about how Arc XP can really solve some unique challenges for digital broadcasters that are looking to take their content for live production and bring it into a digital space. So to set the stage a little bit, there are definitely unique digital challenges for broadcasters. Many vendors here today are thinking about live production, OTT. Arc XP is really about digital and in simple terms, that’s about websites.

Our platform helps broadcasters deliver websites at scale, and that is a platform combining a CMS. If we go to the next slide here, Mike. So we have a CMS with our content, which allows multimedia content to come together around a story. That’s video content, text content, photos, and all the planning workflows behind them. We then marry that up with a digital experience platform. And a DXP is really just a fancy name for how you create a website at scale in a cloud native environment. We have a set of tools for producers, editors, and developers to create a great website experience.

And then finally, we have a set of services for subscriptions to monetize that content. So Arc XP really is this full cloud native solution built on top of AWS services. And the nuance is that we offer this as a SaaS platform for broadcasters and for our customers across the media verticals. Taking a look at how we do this is really four different layers. We have our platform that I described between the CMS and the DXP. We then have a layer of interactions and rendering. You’ll notice that we use a combination of AWS and Akamai technologies.

We handle all this CDN management so that when you put content into Arc XP, whether it’s a video or text, when we render that as a page, we’re making sure it’s high performance when a reader visits it on a site. And then finally, we have client specific front end code. We use open technologies including React. So if you’re a developer on the Arc XP platform, you have a great experience to really hone in and create a great experience around your content in that digital format. So that’s a little bit about saying the stage of what Arc XP does.

If we take a look at the next slide, Mike, I think you want to talk about something we’ve seen from a lot of our customers trying to bridge the digital and the live production worlds.

Michael: Great. So Arc XP powers the websites for a number of different broadcast networks. Graham Media Group, the Gray Media Group, and Cox Media Groups. All of their stations run on the Arc XP platform. So we run all of their websites for each of their stations all over the United States. They live in a very different world in the sense that their content starts as a lot of backend processes and broadcast processes that the vendors in this room help take care of. It generates a giant amount of video content that’s a daily program schedule.

The teams meet together in the morning, they generate a program list, and they focus on creating the broadcast content. But downstream from them, the digital teams are taking that broadcast content and figuring out how to use it to power their websites and then the things that come out of their websites, RSS feeds, Yahoo News feeds, and on and on and on. All of those processes require different things than what they need for their main video stream. Their world is basically unlike other kinds of publishers, it’s a giant fire hose of broadcast content.

And what they’re trying to do is pull out the pieces that they need for the digital environment. They’re pulling out the stories, they’re pulling out images for thumbnails and for social. They’re pulling out clips of the video for the kind of 30 second, two minute version of what people expect to see online. And they’re pulling out galleries of photos to draw people into their stories. It’s a different set of content than most of them are used to.

Joe: And we’re here in the innovation studio because we’re approaching this problem in an innovative way. There’s been a lot of vendors that have focused on the left side of this diagram doing great consolidation of media workflows, using automation, specializing in switchers. Lots of great vendors here have really brought gains in terms of efficiency to the left hand of this diagram. But when we go to customer sites, we see as a complete duplicate workflow for digital production. That’s not only a duplicate workflow, it’s duplicate tools, and it’s duplicate data in terms of the video being storaged.

And finally, it’s duplicating the team members to create that content. So we’ve seen where the challenges for our industry is we haven’t become more efficient over time, even though there’s been lots of technology innovations that have come to the table. And that’s because when we think about what creates complexity, it’s a combination of the number of steps that users have to go through to get the end content to viewers and the number of people required to go through those steps. And what this diagram is showing and the prior one is really from digital perspective, the efficiencies haven’t come forward.

And we have found some ways to really bridge that gap to help broadcasters be more efficient with their digital production.

Michael: So where we’ve been trying to head over the last several years at Arc XP is to build out a content process where you can take this giant stream of video content, break it up and divide it out on a station by station basis, and allow the stations to create unique content that’s specific to their markets. So let me talk for a second about what we’ve seen in larger broadcasters and the challenge that they’re facing. So a number of our partners have an issue where they have national news desks. They’ve acquired or built out a number of stations.

And they have a challenge where they have content being created at the local level, they have content being created at the national level, and they’re trying to figure out how to get an economy of scale on that. In a lot of these cases, they have a process where they have national stories and they pitch them down to individual stations. Those stations can decide whether they want to take them, but that process is very slow and can be cumbersome. Other organizations, and this idea of pitching down is pretty common. Sorry.

Obviously, even though the stories are pitched down, Arc XP has built out an infrastructure where the national organizations can pitch down, and then the local stations can decide whether they want to take that pitch. So you can imagine a story being created at the top. It’s sent down for review and approval, and then it’s automatically added to those individual’s websites. So a station down in Kentucky could see the national news story, and they could decide whether they want to add it or not. The other option is to have stories that are created at one station and have other stations realize that they want to use them.

So for example, you could have a story written in Lexington, Kentucky, and a Louisville station can look at that story and decide that they want to take it and add it to their website. They can either do that by cloning it or they can decide that they want to make a copy and make a different version. This kind of circulation of stories between a national news desk and local stations and between local stations is a pretty common use case. Arc XP has a bunch of tools that give people on digital desks the ability to do this.

They can watch the pitches come in our WebSked planning tool, and they can decide on a story by story basis how to tie it to one station, multiple stations and track it with ease. But one of the challenges you can imagine for this pretty easily is that each of these stories at core, if you want to reuse it, is the same story. What we heard from a lot of our partners is what would be great would be if we could leverage the ability to create one story, but then mutate it to different markets and different market needs. And out of that came a brand new capability that Arc XP’s launching right now called Conditional Content.

Now, if you think of what is in a story that you see on your website, what’s on top of it is there’s a title. You’ll have a big thumbnail linking to the video asset. There’ll be a story underneath it, but stories are composed of a list of blocks. Think of them as paragraphs or a list of bullet points, or it could be an image or a caption or a block quote or something like that. The first version of that story is generally fairly generic, but imagine an ability where you could have a specific block that is conditional or a content zone.

And in that zone, you say I want the ability to change this chunk of content on a station by station or a site by site basis. What might that look like? So you might have a site that you use for the United States, and then you have a different version that’s being used internationally. So you could say, well, for the USA, the generic version should be applicable in any market. But my USA version, what I want to do is have a specific thumbnail that’s highlighting that market’s dynamics. I want to have a different intro block and maybe I want to have a trailing block at the end of it that’s different for the US market.

And also SEO, that’s important. So I probably want different SEO tags in the United States, but I want to be able to leverage the rest of the content. So what does that mean? In the Arc XP environment, you’re now able to go in. So partners of Arc XP who have one structure, they have lots of different sites. Each site can go in there and say, I want to turn on the ability to add content zones. So that’s the first thing is it’s all configuration based. The next thing that they do is they start writing their story. So for example, here’s an example of someone writing a story about the Paris Olympics.

And they’re saying, I want to drop a content zone at the very top, and I’m going to drop a content zone at the very bottom of it. Now, what is that going to let them do? Now they choose variants. So each site can go in there and either decide to choose the default variant, or they can go in and write a specific version of the first and last paragraph for their market. And that intro and the ending and the thumbnail can be specific to what they’re trying to do. So for example, in the United States, you might ... I’m sorry. You might write an international article about the Olympics, and that’s general information.

In the United States, everyone knows that one of the most popular sports in the Olympics is gymnastics. So in the USA, we want to have it. So that intro paragraph has information about the US women’s gymnastics team. So you can just add that as a variant and it’ll automatically add it to the top of the story. You can also go in and see what the lead art is going to be. So in the United States, instead of having a generic image of the Olympics, you can go in and say, this is the women’s gymnastics team.

And those featured media can be either an image or they can be the thumbnails in the video and actually create different clips for that market. So you’re suddenly able to have one generic store, but you’re also able to tailor to the individual market. And when it comes out, the system automatically has one story where the pieces are individualized. Now, you can imagine a lot of different scenarios for this. Sports is a good one, whether it’s national and international or it’s regional. I grew up in Florida, and the Florida-Georgia game was covered very differently depending on which state you are in.

The Florida version talks about how great the Gators are in the beginning, Bulldogs are always there for Georgia, and the rest of the country is just they want to know who won. So you can quickly do things like that. You can do examples about economic interest in different parts of the country. Obviously, politics jumps to mind about different opinions across the United States. And there are other areas where one story can be mutated just a little bit at the top and the bottom to allow a more personalized experience from a major news desk.

Joe: And as Mike mentioned, this is being done at the first layer of our SaaS platform, that agile CMS. So all of this content customization that’s taking place for each site flows through. So the SEO optimization, the CDN optimization can all reflect these variants of the story in a way that’s appropriate for the markets they’re targeting.

Michael: And it’s really a way to leverage local flavor to national stories, which is a big challenge as we’ve been scaling out content across our partners. And as Joe said, there’s more to this than just writing the story. You need to have your entire platform optimized for this kind of content customization. Not only is it the story, it’s the feeds that then come out per site are customized. Integrations to your print CMS can be optimized, localization. All the other processes that are downstream of this in a scaled digital environment have to be considered, and in the Arc environment they are.

So we’re really proud of this capability. We’ve been working on it with the Cox Media Group for several months, and they’re rolling it out right now across their different stations. And we’re just really excited to be able to be allowing these stations to have more powerful capabilities.

Joe: And what we’re highlighting here is kind of one innovation that we’re bringing to one of our partners, but it also exemplifies how Arc XP can be used for a large digital broadcaster to serve many regions simultaneously and efficiently use their digital staff in collaboration with their live production workflows.

Michael: Right.

Joe: How many sites are they they running right now in Arc XP or roughly, Mark?

Michael: Cox has about 60 sites right now.

Joe: So you can imagine the power of taking this conditional content across 60 sites where one story could then be customized for each of their markets and drive the next generation of really digital native readers to find that content through a web experience. And they might transition to OTT or mobile or other places where they can then be monetized.

Michael: And I think one of the things that we’ve seen that’s really interesting is if you look at the beginning of this process, most digital producers are staring at this stream of content and saying, great, I need to make an article about this. We know it’s a hot subject. We want to have a story about the Olympics. And they’ve got a national story, and they’re sitting there staring at it, and they might have breaking local news. There might be a weather news. There might be sports news. They know they need the Olympic story, and the easiest path is just to grab that story, pull it in without any local color and put it into their content feed.

What we’re seeing with conditional content is it allows them to do a little bit more than that. They can add an intro paragraph. If it’s a sports story that’s regional, you could pull in a paragraph at the beginning about a local sports hero who’s on that team. If it’s at the end of it, we’ve seen examples of people talking about economic issues. So you have a story about changes in the petroleum industry, which if you’re in Texas, you want to pull in just one paragraph at the end about the effect of that in your market. You don’t have to rewrite the whole story.

You don’t have to do a lot of the things that customers are doing with AI and ML on the whole story. They can focus on just the thing that is different in their market. And what that allows is for each of these local stations to focus on that local color instead of focusing on repeating all of the overall architectural challenges and all of the content creation. So, that efficiency we’re seeing is a big innovation for a lot of them in time savings. Okay.

Joe: I think that’s all we had today, Mike.

Michael: Yeah.

Joe: Thanks for giving a quick run through of this innovation in Arc XP.

Michael: Great. Okay. Thanks a lot.