An Evolution in University Broadcasting
Challenge
Located in the northern Panhandle of West Virginia (just north of Wheeling), West Liberty University is a forward-looking, four-year public university steeped in rich Appalachian heritage. Beginning as a small studio located in the basement of Elbin Library, West Liberty's television station, WLU-TV14, has grown to include a multi-million dollar facility equipped with leading technologies. WLU-TV14, while reaching 100k+ cable homes through the local cable networks, knew that their delivery strategy needed to envolve to meet younger audiences online — where, when and how viewers wanted to watch their content. Very early in our discussions with WLU we knew that we needed to develop a better understanding of who the platform would be for and what would be important for those users. We invited a cross-functional group of stakeholders from the university to a design workshop where we spent half a day discussing the future of collegiate video and WLU's long-term strategy.
Solution
Through conversations with students and the community, we discovered and prioritized the most common needs amongst users. Designing wireframes combined with the Invision prototyping service helped the project teams collaborate and iterate on design workflows right in the browser. We've planned and developed many websites using both the Drupal 8 content management system and Pantheon's web operations platform, so we felt confident that we could deliver the featureset through these technologies. Video Streaming, however, was a much more nuanced and complex component that needed additional effort to evaluate and understand. Is YouTube Good Enough for Higher Ed? Universities are complex organizations. Any technical solution or strategy we built needed to be flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, not just for today, but for the foreseeable future. Initially, we thought that services like YouTube may be a great fit for video distribution, but given the aspirations of the Topper Station platform, we quickly foresaw roadblocks that would limit future development. Who knew that YouTube couldn't always be the solution? Evaluating Video Hosting Solutions After an exhaustive evaluation of different video hosting platforms, Brightcove was able to check all of our boxes when it came to streaming quality, integrations, and ease of use. They've also built a top-notch integration with our preferred CMS (Drupal 8), which allows us to make managing topperstation.com much easier for editors. With this dual systems approach, one team of people produces and uploads content to Brightcove, while a second team manages the website and social networks. Both teams can operate simultaneously without stepping on each other's toes. In considering the rapid rate of technology change, we also felt this dual-system approach would give the university the opportunity to swap out the website or video hosting services independently of one another. In the future, this approach may also be applied to mobile and OTT applications.
Results
60-day Post-Launch Metrics: 3000+ Monthly Active users 36,800 Pageviews 78% Mobile Traffic
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