ESPN STAR Sports

Case Study
Unified Content Management
ESPN STAR Sports
Business Profile
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Company: ESPN STAR Sports
Industry: Media/Broadcasting/Publishing
Site Scope: Content Management & Public Facing Website
Content Management Solution: VYRE Unify
Domain: www.espnstar.com
Overview and Challenges Faced
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:
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Fresh design interface – the site had not kept pace with the
latest web trends and technologies and was overdue a
facelift.
Increase in the engagement with site visitors – the business
wanted to increase time spent on the site, add social web
activities such as blogs, newsletters and SMS messaging /
alerts, as well as increase video content with highlights and
live streaming of sports content.
Increase in revenue from advertising – the broadcaster’s aim
was to increase the value of advertising space through
enhanced management and positioning of banners and also an
increase in the number of visitors and time spent on the site.
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.
The Tender Proces and Project Objectives
The business knew it needed to become more efficient and gain
control over managing the site by streamlining processes, as well
as enhance the value of the site for visitors and increase revenue.
VYRE Ltd, Zetland House, 5 – 25 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4HJ.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7749 1800 | Fax: +44 (0)20 7749 1801 | [email protected] | www.vyre.com
Registered in England 4536106. VAT Reg No. 802 6421 64
“ 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
The new CMS therefore had to accommodate the following
requirements:
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A reliable CMS and technology provider to underpin a more
efficient sports news site
A personalised web experience based on sport preference.
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
Increase revenue potential
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.
The VYRE Solution
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:
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Traffic to the site has increased more than six fold to
approximately 4 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
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.
VYRE Ltd, Zetland House, 5 – 25 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4HJ.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7749 1800 | Fax: +44 (0)20 7749 1801 | [email protected] | www.vyre.com
Registered in England 4536106. VAT Reg No. 802 6421 64
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
within 20 seconds of the event taking place.
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 useroverride option to allow visitors to the site to override their auto
assignment and choose to set their own sports preference.
User Polling and Greater Interaction on the Site
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.
VYRE Ltd, Zetland House, 5 – 25 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4HJ.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7749 1800 | Fax: +44 (0)20 7749 1801 | [email protected] | www.vyre.com
Registered in England 4536106. VAT Reg No. 802 6421 64
Additional interactive elements integrated on the site include photo
/ video widgets, games widgets, commenting on news, newsletters,
SMS messaging of results and updates, and interactive adverts.
Ad Integration
A key role of the espnstar.com website is to generate revenue by
providing targeted advertising and sponsorship throughout 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.
Business revenues are delivered via advertising, sponsorships and
packaging. Whilst around 20% to 30% comes from ‘spot buy’, the
majority comes from sponsorhips and packaging – much of which is
an integrated package with a TV sponsorship deal. Since the
relaunch of the site in June 2008, ESPN STAR Sports have increased
revenues by over 50%.
However, a far higher percentage is coming directly from online
advertisers rather than via an integrated campaign with a TV
sponsorship deal. Pure online sales of advertising have increased
from around 5% of total revenues to over 30% of total revenues.
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.
VYRE Ltd, Zetland House, 5 – 25 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4HJ.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7749 1800 | Fax: +44 (0)20 7749 1801 | [email protected] | www.vyre.com
Registered in England 4536106. VAT Reg No. 802 6421 64
“Thanks to V YRE and the
flexibility and ease of use
of the V YRE Unify
platform, site visits have
increased six fold to 4
million per month. This in
turn has helped us to
increase online adver tising
quite significantly from
around 5% of total
r e v e n u e s t o o v e r 3 0 % .”
Steve Ackers
Director, Operations Digital Media,
ESPN STAR Sports