Cluj-Napoca, Romania — From an office in this academic town, equidistant to Bucharest, Budapest and Belgrade, a team of developers has completely re-engineered Beet.TV, using the AOL video platform and a highly customized WordPress CMS.
The project, supervised by AOL executives in New York, involved the migration and proper contextualization of some 4,000 videos and blog posts.
Since its launch in 2006, Beet.TV has been published on TypePad — and has used Blip.tv as its primary video platform for the past six years. The transition to the new publishing platform took three months. It went live in April.
The transition of our hundreds of videos on the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, to the platform, is underway and should be concluded in 30 days.
With the new CMS, we are implementing a sophisticated advertising traffic/management system.
Greppy Systems, the Romanian company which handles a number of project for AOL, undertook the Beet.TV project.
For an overview of the project, we produced this video in Cluj-Napoca with interviews with Greppy’s Valentin Maior and Marious Jamolea. Also in the segment, the two explain the work of Greppy — and the emergence of their Romanian city of 300,000 as a technology center.
Many thanks to AOL in New York and Tel Aviv
Also helping on this project was the AOL/5Min developer and editorial teams based in Tel Aviv. Beet.TV has syndicated its video on 5Min for nearly five years. The indexing and tagging of Beet video by the Tel Aviv-based content team was essential in the transition.
Special thanks to our New York-based project manager at AOL Karolis Balciunas, technical mastermind Shay Brog and especially my friend and a great supporter of Beet.TV, AOL video chief Ran Harnevo.
Update on Beet.TV
Beet.TV is growing its video views to about 300,000 per month, reaching a targeted audience of digital influencers around the globe. We are publishing nearly 100 videos a month. In the weeks and months ahead, we will be covering the Cannes Lions festival, producing leadership events in Chicago, New York, Paris, London and other cities. Please follow us on Twitter at @Beet_TV
