CTVNEWS.com Case Study: Rich Media Content Management Meets Interactive News

In early 1999, Blue Zone—a Vancouver-based software development company—approached Canada's largest private broadcaster, Canadian Television (CTV), and presented Blue Zone's patent-pending, rich media content management and publishing software, MediaBZ™, as a foundation for a convergence strategy for CTV. Using the technology, CTV could power its 24-hour news station, CTV Newsnet, as well as a complementary Web site and other interactive properties. By implementing this strategy, CTV's interactive properties would take the lead among broadcasters in terms of process automation, rich media content delivery and multi-platform support. Blue Zone won the contract and was given the opportunity to design and implement a customized version of MediaBZ to make CTV News interactive. In September 2000, CTV launched its new interactive site, CTVNEWS.com. Powered by MediaBZ, CTVNEWS.com content is published simultaneously to the Web, interactive TV (WebTV), Palm and Pocket PC handheld devices and Web-enabled cell phones. Since implementation, CTVNEWS.com has consistently outperformed other news networks in speed to market, length of visitor sessions and volume of stories at a fraction of the cost of large U.S. networks. In less than a year, the CTVNEWS.com team of 15 content creators has published more than 20,000 interactive story packages.

Published

2001-11

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00960

ISBN

978-1-61482-935-5