Background

iPrime, the online arm of Prime TV, Australia’s largest regional TV network, has been chartered with the creation of a network of geographically focused websites for each grouping of 25,000 viewers.  These websites deliver content to each geographical audience that is both locally and nationally relevant for free, endeavoring to attract a repeat audience whilst minimising the cost of content acquisition and maintenance.  

The Problem

iPrime faces the same challenge as many media businesses in this fast-paced, information hungry society. Competing for advertisers who are demanding higher engagement, increased reach and centralized purchasing, iPrime offers a range of national content, but also strives to offer up to 30% of each region’s content from its local area. With so much free information readily available on the web, content acquisition and management are significant costs to media outlets who have not yet managed to find a viable pay-for-service audience for their web content. For this reason, iPrime decided that they needed to build a framework that would radically lower their costs of content sharing across multiple websites, making content management flexible and simple.  In confronting this challenge, all local sites had to comply with broadcast regulations, which demand that content on one grouping of sites could not appear on another.

The Solution

iPrime worked extensively with the Jentla team to build a customized Hub’n’Spoke media application based on Joomla 1.5.  This system, which is distinct from Jentla, was designed in conjunction with Andrew Eddie, the Joomla Core Team lead developer.  It offers unique multisite media content management capability that is otherwise unseen in the industry, streamlining content creation, personalization, localization and delivery through a comprehensive multisite interface.  The product developed for iPrime is different from Jentla in that it offers a specific media-relevant multisite feature set.  However, whilst the product is different, we learned many valuable lessons which have been put to good use in the development of the final Jentla software.  

The Result

The Jentla team delivered a custom solution that fulfilled the specification of the iPrime team.  The Prime TV network now drives much of its online strategy using this technology and has seen a massive cumulative growth in the network of sites underpinned by this system.  The technology has allowed them to centralize their advertising sales, but localize their delivery of content and advertising. 

The sites now include a wide range of page elements, which amalgamate content from a number of sources including internally sourced articles, content from stringers and a wide range of third party RSS feeds.  In all, the sites each contain upwards of 40 feeds. Site positions are all tagged for advertising content relevance, leading to much higher cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) and in turn increased revenue.