Introduction
Since the 1950s, ARD has been uniting regional broadcasters in Germany to bring local viewers the best in television and radio. With nine broadcasters covering 11 television channels and 55 radio channels plus hundreds of digital product offerings, ARD is responsible for massive amounts of multimedia content. Over time this content became scattered across dozens of CMSes, which made it extremely difficult to manage and deliver to a single front-end layer.
Due to content disarray, ARD struggled to provide users with a central and unique video platform showcasing ARD’s truly high-quality content.
A single source of truth
The solution? Adopt a new, unified content management system. In the case of ARD, Contentful. The Content Management API (aka the content hub) separates tightly coupled content aggregation from content delivery infrastructure and creates a single meta layer for content, enabling ARD to curate content in the ARD media library centrally.
“Implementing a content hub for curation liberated ARD from wasting time building and maintaining endless repository structures. It collected all of ARD’s content in a central media library,” says Malte Blumberg, chief technology officer for ARD online. Before Contentful, teams were wasting precious time managing content. It got to the point where developers and content creators didn’t have the capacity to give customers anything new or improved.
“To orchestrate decentralized structures, we needed something that brings together content and services through a great API,” Malte adds.
From zero annual releases to weekly beta releases
Internally, Contentful enabled ARD to experiment and iterate fast. Team members no longer had to sink time and effort into managing a large monolithic solution and the risks that often came with it. Blumberg noted that highlighting this advantage and testing it out made the transition to a content hub much smoother for the digital team. “The best way to change culture is by behavior. If people feel secure making a mistake, if people feel secure trying something out, if people feel responsible — these are the moments where you get people from A to B.”
Blumberg has high hopes for Contentful and what it will bring for ARD after seeing the initial successes of the single, centralized content repository. “A year ago, with the old way, we had no releases in a year,” he says. “Now we are up to one developer release per day, and one beta release per week. And this is just the first step. In one to two years, I actually want 50 to 60 releases per day.”
Modernizing how content flows
ARD launched a public beta of their media library at IFA in Berlin with significant positive feedback. Implementing the content hub as a curation tool allowed ARD to improve their core product offerings, focus on delivering what subscribers actually want and position ARD for a massive market shift. With this shift, the average person spends far more time online than they do watching broadcast television.
In other words, consider traditional TV and radio as broadcasting 1.0 and posting those offerings online as broadcasting 2.0. ARD is now pioneering the transition to broadcasting 3.0, where the online format drives a unique, non-linear customer experience. In this new format, content and channels sit independently of the platform.
The new ARD media library is now accessible to everyone at ardmediathek.de. However, the beta version will always remain. And, it’ll be a couple of steps ahead of the main version. This empowers ARD to constantly deliver and try new features — to build a unique video platform that’s responsive to the changing needs of its audience.
