17 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY
Arc Publishing, partnering with AWS, offers a suite of integrated digital tools to help journalists
planning; PageBuilder, a web page development tool; Bandito, a variant testing engine; and Darwin, a tool for testing a site’s UX by managing and running parallel A/B tests. “These days, broadcasters represent a significant portion of our growth,” says Monahan. “There are a number of features we’ve added over the past year that have a particular focus on broadcasters who are looking to make the transition to the digital space first. I think many of them were using vendor-provided CMSs, or something they built themselves that was poorly integrated with their broadcast systems. So digital was this sort of afterthought. It was a bolted-on component downstream from what they were working on in broadcast.” At first, one of the product development areas Arc focused on was making it easier for live streams coming from a broadcast to be automatically converted into the requisite video on demand (VOD) clips, or clipped while streaming into VOD, which could then be used on a customer site. “Previously, a lot of broadcasters had a workflow where they waited for the broadcast to finish, then had to wait to replicate the file from a broadcast system to digital system. It meant that whatever they were trying to publish online took place hours after the broadcast finished.” Arc Publishing’s tools allow for live clipping of a live stream as it happens, including cropping the aspect ratio for delivery to different social platforms. The
OUR GOAL IS TO HELP OUR BROADCAST CUSTOMERS BETTERMONETISE THE VIDEO ASSETS AND HAVE THEM PRODUCED NATIVELY ON THEIR OWN PLATFORMS
Washington Post had been a long-time partner of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which collaborated with them on building the new video tools. “What’s been good about that partnership is broadcasters were already speaking to AWS quite a bit,” says Monahan. “The company understood this idea of moving a lot of traditional broadcast workflows to the cloud. Then, with our tools, we’ve been able facilitate some of those new workflows using AWS Elemental Media Services, making it easy for producers working at a TV station to tell their stories and make updates a lot faster than they were previously.” Arc is on the verge of shipping a number of new features, including script integration with broadcast systems, allowing producers to more easily create stories around their online video. Dynamic ad insertion will soon be available and, further down the line, features for live streaming from mobile applications, which will allow correspondents or remote
producers to create live streamed content entirely within the platform. “What we see quite a bit of is reporters who work for broadcast stations, out in the field, wanting to create a quick live stream separate from the broadcast segment they’re producing. At present, they reach for other platform’s tools, like Facebook Live. But our goal is to help our broadcast customers better monetise the video assets and have them produced natively on their own platforms,” says Monahan. “AWS is a great partner to work with, and its specific products have been perfect for the work we’re trying to do. Especially at the beginning, with some of our use cases, we were bringing more usage and more users to AWS than it had previously had. AWS was great about
stepping up and helping us work through those use cases, really scaling up the business.”
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