Hearst-Argyle Television

Multi-Media Company Turns to Sparta Social Networks for
Nationwide Communities with Local Flare

Business Challenge

Hearst-Argyle Television , Inc. owns 26 television stations and manages an additional three television and two radio stations owned by Hearst Corporation, in geographically diverse U.S. markets. The Company's television stations reach approximately 18% of U.S. TV households, making it one of America 's largest television station groups.

Hearst-Argyle approached Sparta with the core business objective of increasing viewership by leveraging social networking tools to attract younger viewers to local news broadcasts.

The company had a vision to provide a rich, local community-oriented, multi-media experience to its millions of viewers across the country—combining TV, web, and mobile devices—and leveraging Hearst-Argyle Television's local and national resources . The focus: a local high school sports action community, HighSchoolPlaybook.com. The ambitious project sought to combine social networking with sports statistics and robust, high-definition video, providing by a unique experience to local communities and enabling Hearst to capture a larger young viewer audience. Community involvement and cross-media activity at the grass roots level was essential for success. A combination of sources, including professional TV videographers, users from throughout the country, and specially trained student journalists (designated as Sideline Reporters) equipped with high-definition camcorders were to create, post, and maintain content. For example, content from the student Sideline Reporters would be broadcast on Hearst-Argyle television station local news reports.

Hearst had many challenges in standing up these communities. They had 45 days to get HighSchoolPlaybook.com up and running across seven different media markets prior to the beginning of the new school year. Because the service needed to scale nationwide to 30 networks within one year, they needed a solution built on a scalable platform to meet the demands of anticipated growth. And because HighSchoolPlaybook.com served local communities but required country-wide management, Hearst needed a solution that would enable communities to manage local content yet also provide central management and visibility across all communities. Finally, they were looking for a provider and a platform that could seamlessly integrate functional and technical requirements including:

•  Preservation of the Hearst-Argyle brand with adherence to strict brand guidelines

•  Complex integration to external systems for real-time ‘from the field' sports information (rosters, scores, stats)

•  Ability to easily create a totally unique community specific to Hearst's user needs for look and feel, and functionality

•  Highly complex ad serving DoubleClick DART integration including interstitials, unique demographically-driven, page-specific placement ads, and page skinning

•  Seamless integration with Google analytics, Google maps, and numerous weather channels

•  News and User Statistics functions at a local level, as well as cross-communities

The Sparta Solution

Sparta delivered Hearst-Argyle a highly scalable and flexible Java-based social networking solution that allowed Hearst to readily integrate a myriad of complex technical requirements while maintaining complete creative control over the look and feel and functionality of HighSchoolPlaybook.com. Sparta 's Enterprise Social Network platform integrated seamlessly into Hearst-Argyle's technology footprint, with site rollout well underway in under 45 days.

Equally valuable to the Java architecture core was SmartScale TM , Sparta 's unique integration methodology based on a shared network capability, which permits Hearst-Argyle to quickly deploy communities with a local flare, integrating separate network-driven properties across the country on the same platform, all manageable from a single console. No other provider of social networking technologies provides this critical feature for deploying and managing separate but related communities. SmartScale TM will provide Hearst-Argyle the ability to quickly scale its user community from thousands to hundreds of thousands of users without significant technological impact, while providing a local look and feel with centralized management.