PHOENIX — Since it started seven years ago, The Washington Post’s in-house, self-built software line-up has grown in size and in customer base. Now it is being used by a whole new industry – broadcast.

Products under the Post’s “Arc Publishing” studio include many more than when Beet.TV last wrote about Arc two years ago:

  • PageBuilder story creator
  • Ellipsis storytelling tool
  • Anglerfish photo manager
  • Goldfish video CMS
  • WebSked story planning tool
  • Bandito multi-variant content A/B tester
  • Darwin UX A/B tester
  • Clavis personalization engine
  • Metered Paywall engine
  • Carta mewsletter management system
  • Heliograph AI-powered automated content generator
  • Mod Bot AI-powered comment moderation
  • Subscription churn propensity modelling

They were built not just to service the Post itself, but are offered to all comers – beginning with university newspapers, then growing through small papers, US metropolitan titles and around the world.

Then, in December, Arc announced it would be branching in to broadcat, too – powering websites and apps for 39 Raycom Media stations.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shailesh Prakash, Washington Post CIO,  explains Arc’s, well… arc.

“It’s a CMS (content management system), if you will – but it’s an end-to-end set of tools that are loosely coupled together,” Prakash says.

“And ‘loosely’ is important because you don’t have to buy the whole thing in order to take advantage of it. You could still use your own editor and use our planning tool, or you could just take the video tools that some of our broadcast customers have taken, or you could take advanced services like content generation, automatic content generation, or recommendation engines.”

In adopting some of Arc’s offering, Raycom joins other users like Willamette Week, Alaska Dispatch News, La Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Inquirer, La Parisian in France, El Pais in Spain, Infobae in Argentina and NZME in New Zealand.

But Raycom’s use of Arc’s tools isn’t just about powering its CMS text. Prakash says its ownership by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has helped it branch out.

“We are fortunate that we have a very strong tie-in with Amazon, given that we know somebody there,” he explains.

“Our video suite under the covers is powered by Elemental, which is a company that Amazon bought. It’s a startup, a video startup. And what that helps us do is to build on top of Elemental and offer broadcasters a very quick way, a seamless way to get their broadcast content onto the web and on to their apps. So, the cycle is more efficient, and it’s real-time clipping of what they do in broadcast.”

Raycom won’t be the last stop Arc makes on the video journey.

“We haven’t announced yet, but we have another large broadcaster that we’ll announce shortly,” Prakash hints.

https://twitter.com/sprakash007/status/1096050720040722434

Following this interview, Arc announced it would serve Graham Media Group, which said it would use Arc’s tools to enable journalists to quickly and efficiently cut and publish live video to the web, mobile, social media and other channels, as well as publish breaking news video during a broadcast.

“And we have a very large broadcaster called RTL in Germany that’s using Arc. And we hope that broadcast is a vertical that can benefit from some of the video technology we have powered, we’ve partnered with Amazon to bring up for them.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix.   This series is sponsored by Telaria.  Please find additional videos from the series on this page. 

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews