Our editorial team can produce 2x the amount of content now that we have Brightspot.
The SBS Australia challenge
The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is one of five major free-to-air networks in Australia, with a portfolio that spans five TV channels, an extensive radio network and a digital offering with on-demand content.
The broadcaster had multiple content management system (CMS) platforms, hosted on Drupal and two other platforms, making its content-management operations inefficient and cumbersome.
In addition to the need to reduce the total cost of its technology ownership, SBS needed a modern content management systems (CMS) that could scale and support future digital innovation. In particular, SBS was in need of a publishing solution that could support content in over 60 languages, including some languages that use nontraditional fonts or text, making the requirements of the solution more complex.
Limitations with its Drupal-based setup was impeding SBS's ability to deliver the best possible digital experiences to the millions of Australians who enjoy SBS content each month.
The Brightspot solution for SBS Australia
SBS selected Brightspot for the power and flexibility of its GraphQL-powered headless offering. With a new headless CMS implementation, SBS is now able to deliver content to its front-end application via Brightspot's GraphQL endpoints.
Brightspot was easy to pick up. Staff can create content now without a lot of hand holding.
On the back end, SBS's editorial users have access to the full array of Brightspot CMS capabilities, including content templates, workflow tools, reporting features and more. This feature set was of particular importance to the broadcaster, as the new solution needed to be delivered while bringing minimal disruption to its existing business and editorial operations.
In an effort to create as little disruption as possible with the CMS migration, the new user interface (UI) in the CMS was carefully customized to adhere to SBS's existing newsroom processes. This included building out various content forms, dashboards and workflows to ensure SBS's editors, reporters and producers could adapt quickly to the new CMS UI.
The outcome for SBS Australia
- SBS is taking advantage of Brightspot’s multisite content-management capabilities to present and organize content offerings across an array of formats as well as languages.
- Along with customized GraphQL development to support SBS's front-end "head," another significant area of customization for the new platform includes multilingual support for 70 languages, such as Cantonese, Greek, Hmong and Somali. Translations can be managed by program, brand and language via Brightspot's flexible roles and permissions setup.
- Using Brightspot's Assignment Desk and inbuilt custom workflow engine, SBS editors and contributors stay organized and efficient as content moves from end-to-end through the entire publishing process.
- SBS is leveraging CMS integrations for digital news feeds from agencies including AP and Reuters, a federated-search integration for Getty Images, Adobe Analytics tracking and various integrations for the broadcaster's proprietary audio and video feeds.
SBS Australia in brief
