Every media organization has its own working culture. They have their own processes, terminologies, and working style. Over the last 20 years, they have been using many paid/SAAS platforms available, which have a substantial market share. However, today, there is a huge shift in mindset. Instead of using a proprietary platform or SAAS, they are more inclined to design custom solutions that fit their working style and use open source platforms that save them from paying high licensing fees and improve their margins.
Features and challenges
• Multiple Web Properties: Through our experience working with media companies, we have found that most media clients may have 20 or more web properties, which are difficult to maintain. Many of these properties come from partnerships/mergers/acquisitions and many of them are built on different technologies. These properties operate on different infrastructures, making them difficult to manage and maintain. Many times these digital properties need maintenance and updates in different media languages to standardize operations.
• Diverse content types: People think that publishing content like a story and the presence of image/video libraries makes for a highly interactive media website, which is not true. Seriously speaking, a media website demands a variety of content types, templates for all content types, and on top of that, a powerful admin UX with great authoring tools and workflows.
• Lots of taxonomy terms: Taxonomies like sections, categories, and tags are the heart of any media platform. With the number of taxonomy terms easily growing into the millions, it is difficult to manage them and provide a management interface.
• High volume of content and massive traffic: Most media websites have a huge volume of content and traffic on a daily basis. In that case, website performance and integration of caches and Content Distribution Network (CDN) are important. But since caching and CDN need proper integrations, it is difficult to maintain content freshness along with performance.
• Real-time content: in addition to data bandwidth, faster Internet speeds and powerful mobile devices; Media organizations demand real-time content, especially during elections, natural calamities and other major events that must be handled carefully and intelligently. These events can cause the entire system to miss due to low cache time.
• Unique work style and culture: Every media organization has a different work culture and work style – how the desk should be managed during the day vs. at night, general approval hierarchy vs. hierarchy on sensitive topics, ideation processes in case of magazines etc. Your editors and sales department want things to work in a particular way. However, companies are focused on productivity. To achieve productivity, they need a simple yet powerful admin UX.
• Different types of media event coverage: Events are an integral part of the media business model as they generate more news. All media companies organize events and invite opinion leaders, politicians and celebrities to share their views. These events are multi-day events and require a different type of handling both at the administrator and the end user. Therefore, they require a larger and faster system to handle the crowd.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM): One of the biggest challenges for a media organization is to manage digital assets like images, videos, PDF documents, etc. Organizations spend a lot of money on licensing a DAM solution and the same DAM solutions do not fit their requirements. After cloud storage services like AWS S3 etc. became popular, organizations now want their DAM system to be a part of their online portal with customized requirements.
• Multi-channel content delivery: With the wide adoption of mobile technologies, people have started using smart devices, social media and other content delivery channels such as desktop web, mobile web/PWA, mobile apps, news, ticker and billboards, internet TV, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. in their daily lives. Therefore, media companies need to adopt the policy of “create once and publish anywhere” to be visible to the whole world.
• Content as a service and content monetization: Many media agencies sell their content to other media and non-media organizations as a service and monetize it. For example, news and entertainment agencies provide their content to telecom operators for their value-added services. In this case, they need a monitoring and accounting engine for their media platform.
• Continuous customization: Since change is the only constant, media companies need customizations to their existing platform. To achieve this, they pay more fees to the platform provider or look for some other provider who can support their existing systems. It is often very difficult to customize these payment platforms and companies have to live with the limitations of the existing platform.
When considering all of these challenges, I think Drupal 8 is the obvious choice for media companies. Drupal meets most of these requirements with a certain degree of customization. Organizations are free to use the correct Drupal 8 distribution as needed. The Headless Drupal 8 distribution, like Contenta and Reservoir, is ideal for multichannel delivery and content as a service.
