Recently, Kuliza worked with a leading South Indian news giant (Among the top 3 TV News Networks) to build a new age Over-the-top (OTT) digital news and entertainment platform. What distinguished the platform from others is the custom CMS built on an open source technology to provide a superior and personalized digital experience. The CMS supports multi-lingual platforms and is built to scale up to one million hits per day. To know more about the end-to-end development process, you can read our case study below:

1. New Age OTT Platform
Context Kuliza assists South Indian media giant with digital
transformation
As consumers move from traditional media to new age devices like mobiles and
Chromecasts, digital providers are thinking ahead of the hyper-connected horizon,
keeping pace with consumer expectations. With the content renaissance unfolding,
context becomes the key diffrentiator. Currently, media companies move from a first
OTT generation, an experiment with little or no democracy and linear broadcast, to a
more mature second generation OTT that involves commissioning their own original
content and module. To take advantage of digital opportunities, media players need to
use data-driven insights to build their product across the full development cycle.
Technologies
BACKEND FRONTEND

2. Objectives A leading South Indian News Giant (one of the top 3 TV news networks) was looking
for a new age Over-the-top (OTT) digital news and entertainment platform. The need
of the hour was a custom built CMS over open source technologies. This provides
the user with a superior and personalized digital news experience. The client was
also looking forward to a native video streaming along with advertisement engine
integration. Some of the specific objectives of the client were:
• Creating a world class digital news and entertainment destination for online
viewers
• ‘One-stop’ CMS solution, creating a holistic view, facilitating access and sharing of
content between editorial departments
• Enable native video player integration and ad server integration to get more
control on advertising
• Seamless video streaming at varying internet bandwidths and fast loading images
• CMS to support multilingual system
• Support editorial and admin related workflows and collaboration within the
editorial
• Develop robust scalable OTT apps
• To build a scalable platform to handle 1 million users per day

3. Solution In order to meet our news channel’s requirement, a centralized custom architecture
was our best solution. This provided a bird’s eye view of all components of the
company’s editorial system. The robust and scalable architecture is capable of
adapting to the changing digital landscape and could seamlessly be integrated with
third party tools.
COMPONENTS
01
CMS
The challenge of creating a robust informational architecture laid in meticulously
defining underlying data structures and came down to three factors - The ability to
control complex backend editorial workflows from a central nucleus, the ability to
manage content with a strict definition of workflows with the help of the CMS and
thirdly support scalable OTT apps. To solve these challenges, we built a custom
CMS with defined workflows and publishing capabilities. The key advantage of a
customized CMS comes with the ability of integrating third party tools and applications,
an advanced lock-in mechanism for easy editing and a customized workflow to suit
industry needs.
02
ADMIN
The admin enjoys privileges across the entire CMS including news workflow, the
independence to create and manage users, assign permissions, create categories and
tags. A customized CMS also enables him to override permissions and take a central
control with a bird’s eye view of user management.
03
VIDEO
Observing that more than 40% of users leave if the video takes more time to load,
the challenge here was to provide a consistent viewing experience across devices.
This was achieved with the assistance of DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Bitrate over
HTTP) which automatically adapts your bitrate in accordance to your bandwidth. This
provides the user with an undeterred streaming experience and video adaptability to
different screens. A third party integration with Akamai provided video transcoding
functions through APIs that can be customized and incorporated into our CMS. Akamai
also enables us with a video player, CDN, and analytics for the videos.
04
INTEGRATION
A customized CMS follows a service-oriented architecture that can be integrated
with third-party tools like PR news wires, ad, and video servers. In this case, we have
integrated our CMS with Akamai which transcodes videos from our client’s severs
and provides the platform with a URL, which can be directly pinched into the content
stream. Our client also provides ads from ad servers like Google and Zedo and this
script is fed into the CMS.

4. Capabilities • Full fledged multi-lingual supported CMS
• Different UI representation layers
• Ease of publishing with defined templates
• User management suits typical news industry workflow
05
ANALYTICS
To understand if our objectives are being met, we have integrated with third party tools
like Google Analytics that gives us a reporting perspective to customer interaction and
engagement. This enables us to provide them with content recommendations. The
customized CMS is futuristic and is capable of integrating with advanced analytical
tools.
Features • Advanced personalization
• Multi-Lingual support
• Central Admin authorization
• Role-based access
• Dynamic layout & themes
• Multi-site with central authorization
• Analytics
• Schedule publishing content
• Centralized image repository
• Timeline story
• User Interest capture
• News Localization
Kuliza is a product engineering company with expertise in design and development.
We assist clients such as Hindu, Deccan Herald, Ford, HDFC Life and Titan among
others build end-to-end products on both web and mobile.
About Kuliza