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Brief
ESPN STAR Sports is a broadcast collaboration between ESPN and Star Networks to provide diverse and high quality sports programming from around the globe to the Central and Southern Asia region. The company's website, espnstar.com, was hugely successful and consistently appearing in the top 2000 sites on the web.
The business case around the drive for change was based on improving the service to both clients and advertisers and providing the ESPN STAR Sports web team with greater control. Key business drivers included:
• Fresh design interface - the site had not kept pace with the latest web trends and technologies and was overdue a facelift.
• Improved performance - ESPN STAR Sports' old site had become unreliable with an average of 8 to 10 hours per week of down time.
• Improved content management and front end functionality - the CMS system to manage the site and publish content had organically grown into an unwieldy and clunky tool. This was preventing espnstar.com from implementing significant front end improvements.
• Speed of publishing - time to publish content was unacceptable. For example news articles on feed took 20 to 30 mins to publish.
• Quicker time to market and greater control over costs - as the site was managed by a 3rd party; ESPN STAR Sports had no real control. This also had time and cost implications as changes and updates could not be done in-house.
Strategy
The business knew it needed to become more efficient. The new CMS therefore had to accommodate the following requirements:
• A reliable CMS and technology provider to underpin a more efficient sports news site
• Changing the way content is processed by streamlining processes
• Allowing the ESPN Star Sports team to manage its site internally
• Having control over the site and content and its management instead of relying on a 3rd party
• Being able to quickly and easily publish or update content especially images, live results and scores as they happen, as well as advertising
• Adding Web 2.0 features to fully engage visitors
• Efficient management and deployment of video and rich media
Having control over managing the site was the company's main drive as it would mean streamlining processes and hence helping the business become more efficient as a result.
The business invited several CMS vendors to give product demos. VYRE were appointed along with their partner RedBee Media to provide a cutting edge front end, high volume site supported by an efficient, user-friendly and robust backend CMS tool that would have the flexibility to grow as espnstar.com and their consumers' needs changed over time. But more importantly the solution would also give ESPN STAR Sports the control over its site that would help it to increase efficiencies internally.
Execution & Results
Content
The key challenge faced by espnstar.com was to ensure that their site, which is essentially a sports news and statistics site, is constantly up-to-date with the latest news and information across a wide range of sports in a wide range of countries and regions around the world.
Since the launch of the new site espnstar.com has seen the following great improvements:
• Traffic to the site has doubled to approximately 1.3 million visitors per month
• The site's bounce rate has been decreased by 10%
• Stickiness of the site has been increased from 5 mins to 8 mins for the average user, who now looks at an average of 6 pages
• The site demonstrates excellent uptime and no longer crashes as it used to
"Since the implementation of VYRE Unify we can offer a truly interactive site with up-to-date content, latest scores and results as and when they happen. We are now able to make good use of Web 2.0 features on the site as well as rich media, and the freshness of the content has increased significantly. As a result the time visitors now spend on the site has increased from 5 mins to 8 mins on average." Steve Ackers, Director, Operations Digital Media, ESPN STAR Sports
In terms of content management VYRE Unify has enabled ESPN STAR Sports to take control of its content. The solution is user-friendly and allows ESPN STAR Sports to easily manage its site in-house as non-technical staff can make quick changes and updates.
The content management process was streamlined through the use of templates, which bring structure to the whole process as pages can be easily added based on templates. This means the in-house ESPN team is now even able to add new sections and new pages easily to the site.
While the editorial team at espnstar.com is capable of producing news content but given the 24x7 nature of sports news it was clear that there was a need to provide a level of automation to assist the editors and to ensure the site was never stale.
In order to achieve this espnstar.com subscribed to the Press Association (PA) automated sports news and statistics XML feeds for their key sports (cricket and football). These feeds provide vast amounts of detailed, structured data from PA news desks and wires around the world on a 24x7 basis.
VYRE developed a bespoke XML processing and parsing application to process and import this raw data into VYRE on a scheduled basis. The feeds cover everything from news and related images to football scored, cricket scorecards, fixtures, results and standings. The process is efficient and robust enough to even be able to provide real time live match play data for both football and cricket.
Consumer Preferences
The demographic of the espnstar.com audience is split, almost down the middle, between cricket and football orientated users. Most visitors to the site from India are primarily interested in viewing news and information about cricket whereas the rest of the users (Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines) are predominantly interested in football content.
In order to cater for the different emphasis of the consumers of the site, VYRE developed the ability for the site to contain two home pages, one football centric and one cricket centric and to display the appropriate one to visitors based on geographical IP address resolution. Although this system is a useful "best guess" approach to successfully targeting content VYRE has also implemented a user-override option to allow visitors to the site to override their auto assignment and choose to set their own sports preference.
User Polling
A vital component of any sports website is the ability to allow users to participate in polls in order to gauge their opinion on the hot topics of the day against the rest of the world. espnstar.com required the ability to not only create and administer polls themselves but to have the flexibility to place a poll on any relevant page and to combine the responses in to a single result that can be instantly updated and displayed to the user on submission. In order to achieve this VYRE developed a polling portlet which is powerful and scalable enough to support tens of thousands of responses per poll and to allow the polls to be placed on the required pages via the CMS interface.
Ad Integration
A key role of the espnstar.com website is to generate revenue by providing targeted advertising on the site. The advertising provider chosen by espnstar.com was Double Click and VYRE were required to not only display Double Click ads on the site but to allow the ads to be configured by site administrators via the CMS layer. Using the CMS espnstar.com
can not only pinpoint the position of their ads on any page but can supply page specific tagging to allow them to push the right ads to the right content areas on the right page.
Thanks to the use of templates within the CMS the ESPN STAR Sports team can now also easily and quickly put up last minute requests. For example advertising booked last minute based on the top cricket player of a particular week can now be turned around within 2 hours when it would have taken 3 weeks before.
Flash Integration
The re-design of the site included a number of Flash "widgets" to provide a rich user experience and to provide the wow factor that the old site was certainly lacking. The Flash widgets are used to allow visitors to select between bloggers, galleries, video items and games available on the site. The widget are completely flexible on terms of page placement and use custom XML feeds distributed by the CMS in order to supply the correct CMS managed content to the front end user.
The Future
espnstar.com are already looking to expand the capabilities of the system to be able to include automation for more of their key sports (tennis, golf and motorsport). This will enable the editorial team to spend more time to concentrate on generating high quality copy for other areas of the site that do not contain automated content. The site will also be further expanded to include user forums and user comments to allow visitors to comment and discuss topical issues raised by bloggers and columnists on the site.
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