Yahoo 7
Enabling video clip creation from live broadcast streams, video editing and rapid social media publishing.
The Client
Yahoo7 is a 50-50 partnership between global internet company, Yahoo! and Australian entertainment and television broadcasting company, Seven West Media. Yahoo7 is a web portal, providing email, online news and lifestyle content, as well as weather, travel and retail comparison services.
In January 2010, Yahoo7 launched PLUS7, an online catch-up portal for viewers to stream select TV shows with locked commercials and Seven News updates for a limited period of time after airing. The free service allows users to watch a range of video content on demand. PLUS7 is available on desktop, mobile and tablet devices as well as other platforms including Fetch TV, Xbox, PlayStation and Telstra TBox.
Yahoo7’s mission is to make the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining. By creating highly personalised experiences for their users, they keep people connected to what matters most to them, anywhere, anytime and across any device.
“We are delighted to provide Yahoo7 with our Live2VOD solution that enables real-time creation and publishing of video clips and images from their live broadcast. This allows Yahoo7 to immediately share the most up to the minute news that’s happening across all of their channels.”
Mark Wilson
Head of Product, Switch Media
The Challenge
Yahoo7 rely on very quick turn-around of their short-form VOD content, especially when it comes to time-critical shows like the Morning News. The solution had to enable the editors to create clips in real-time while the show is being broadcast, and do it with frame accuracy via an intuitive and easy-to-use GUI tool. The solution also had to integrate with Yahoo7’s existing internal Content Management System with its custom field and taxonomy structure, as every clip the editors create needs to be published to that CMS to appear on the affiliated websites. Further, advanced social sharing capabilities were required as editorial teams from different channels and regions needed different accounts and access levels.
Project Outcomes & ROI
With the final solution driven by Media Manager and Live2VOD products, Yahoo7 got a flexible, scalable and highly redundant solution for their editorial teams to produce short-form content.
As of 1st April 2017, Yahoo7 creates and publishes more than 700 pieces of short-form content a week using Live2VOD, of which almost 50% is time-critical news content. A content clip can be made available on PLUS7 or Yahoo7’s social media channels within 2 minutes of going to air.
The editorial teams are backed by full 24/7 support from Switch Media’s Service Delivery Team. With the ongoing relationship and collaboration between Yahoo7 and Switch Media, continuous improvements are being released to the online editing tools. These include new features and UI/UX improvements, with the future roadmap including single sign-on, advanced user permissions and one-click publishing to all PLUS7 platforms directly from Media Manager.
Switch Media’s Role
Switch Media’s role was to provide a set of tools for the use of Yahoo7 content publishing teams across Australia.
The Media Editor and EPG tools are part of the Media Manager suite and are powered by Switch Media’s proprietary Live2VOD solution. This enables the editors to record any show from live TV, trim and create clips of that show even as it is still live on air, and rapidly publish to their CMS or the linked social media channels. Live2VOD records and stores all of Seven Network’s encrypted HLS live streams 24/7 so editors are able to tap into a rolling window of several weeks’ worth of recorded material.
Switch Media was involved since the early scoping stage to determine a set of must-have requirements as well as the future roadmap to accommodate nice-to-have feature requests from the editorial teams.
Project Summary
Live2VOD features include:
- Create VOD assets from live streams, whether in real-time or in retrospect.
- Create many clips/highlights from the same live recording.
- Publish to Facebook, Twitter and other linked social media accounts.
- Create, post-process and publish still images.
- Assign tags and add metadata in real-time, before publishing created VOD content to your existing CMS.
“Yahoo7’s full set of requirements was delivered using Switch Live2VOD, an advanced tool to easily capture live and linear streams, perform on the fly clipping and editing, and share across devices and social media.”
