YTV.com Case Study
Goals and challenges
In order to gain parity between the content offerings on the YTV television channel and the online YTV.com portal, in August 2009 Corus embarked on project to upgrade all of their properties to thePlatform’s latest Player Development Kit (PDK). Their goals included:
- Integrating television show information, games, video, and more to create a complete experience for their tweens audience
- Integrating clickable ads and ad tracking
- Creating a video player that reflected the look of the site and the TV channel
- Integrating their custom community tools
thePlatform’s solution
Integrating TV show info
A main function of the YTV video portal is reinforcing its relationship with the television channel, and a big part of that is letting the web audience easily get to show times, episode information, and other data. Up until last summer, users would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get to this data by clicking on a navigation bar link, navigating to a show category in a new window, and then rifling through episodes for the one they wanted. And not only was the process difficult for the audience, but show data had to be manually edited for each page on which it appeared.
What could the PDK offer to help users easily find show data? YTV had never focused on the PDK beyond the basics. As part of YTV site rebuild, they considered looking at video as integral to the station and not in a silo. One obvious way integrating the player into the new site was to embed the player on the page, instead of having a new window open for each video.
Their embedded PDK player makes a direct web service call to the TV schedule feed and then displays that information with the video. This not only makes it easy to show the most current data with the video, but it eliminates the need for web producers to manually update show information.
Advertising integration
YTV was using only pre-roll ads, but when advertisers showed interest in their player capabilities, YTV added more formats and enabled click-throughs using thePlatform’s ad serving partner ADTECH. Because the focus of the PDK is customization, YTV didn’t have to do a lot of work to integrate management, advertising, or reporting systems. They just need to direct the player to the appropriate system, such as their Omniture Site Catalyst account, and the data gets delivered.
Player design
For their site redesign their team had to replicate the YTV television branding, whose design attributes include a 3D look and brighter colors than the previous portal design. The new player design also had to follow suit. “We could do a basic PDK player in an hour, but we wanted to integrate with the look of the site, which is kind of funky, unique, and challenging” says Jeff Laughlin, Manager of Technical Operations, Interactive at Corus, Inc.
They designed the home page player because, although smaller than players on sub-pages, it required more functionality, including links for sharing and rating videos. For the URL and email functions, they used the built-in PDK code and just had to skin the buttons. They then based sub-page player designs on the home page player.
YTV producers have a unique way of setting up the site for launch. Because site design is dictated by often-changing TV content, they don’t populate the site with the final look until right before it goes live. Instead, they use placeholder images for the space that’s waiting for content. Then it’s very simple to go in and swap this content out for the “real” content prior to launch.
Community integration
YTV built their own community application that uses .NET web services, AJAX, and jQuery. The application uses internal feeds for user-specific and schedule info and depends on the PDK to pull in the video ID and pass it to the web service. (YTV uses feeds from thePlatform for video and categories.)
A popular custom community feature is the “Yay/Boo” rating tool, which lets kids give a video a thumbs up or down and shows summarized results on mouse-over.
Benefits and results
Reinforcing the relationship between the TV channel and the web site has been very successful for YTV, as is proven by the spike in web traffic when an on-air host refers the audience to the site. This is particularly true when they offer a code to gain access to a new game, which is a good way to obtain definite cross-platform statistics.
The next step is using the YTV project as a template for Nick Canada and Treehouse TV, which are other Corus kids’ entertainment properties. Using the PDK, these other properties can focus purely on custom look, feel, and enhancements for their particular sites.
