Building a Scalable Web Application for News Portal of TV and Radio Broadcaster

Challenge

National TV broadcasting company had low digital market performance and decided to improve their presence on the media market. It aimed to develop reliable and stable digital news and video broadcasting portal to engage with the online audience to boost the total income.

When 24TV.UA turned to Romexsoft for help, the company had a website with lots of back-end issues resulting in poor performance. It couldn’t handle more than 1000 unique users at once.

The Romexsoft target was to develop a highly competitive and scalable website, that would attract 200k users per day and help 24TV.UA become a leader in the digital media market.

Solution

To reach the goal and attract a wide online audience Romexsoft conducted a Rescue Mission and developed web (24TV) and mobile (“News 24” on AppStore for iPhone and Google Play for Android) applications and SmartTV (Samsung and LG).
Currently, 24TV is in the top 4 online news contributors in Ukraine reaching up to 1 million unique online users per day during the resonance events, and covering 14,4% of the Ukrainian internet audience.

News 24 mobile app was the first one of its kind in Ukraine which allowed building a reliable relationship with users and become the top 3 of News category on App Store. At the moment, News 24 app is in the top 10 in both AppStore and Google Play charts.
The target was reached by raising user engagement and time spent on 24tv.ua. Romexsoft used the essentials of Data Science to create algorithms that show users only relevant and interesting information based on their previous searches and posts that they have opened.

By developing a full-text, hit highlighting and faceted search, we improved website usability and increased the number of user views.

In addition to making news available as online broadcast and “on-demand”, we created and implemented applications for Smart TV Samsung, LG, and Dune HD.

Key features include:

• latest news/videos managing and releasing;
• content search based on Solr API;
• Google search integration;
• live podcasts;
• news and TV programs archives;
• authors blogs and users comments;
• polls creation;
• integration with Newsmaker project (web live streaming)
• production support and distribution of video content (video streaming & live streaming) via applications for Smart TV and other players;
• one user database for all related portals.

Media Company “TRK LUX” was founded in 2004 as a small radio station and has turned into a leading market player with one national TV channel, the 24TV, 2 radio stations, 7 internet news portals, and other online projects.