San Francisco, CA (1888PressRelease)
June 03, 2008 - Castfire, Inc. a leading white-label broadband audio and video publishing company, is pleased to announce that it will power KCRW’s online audio and video podcasts and downloads and provide the technology to help the Santa Monica-based station manage the delivery of underwriting and sponsorships across all its audio and video channels. KCRW (89.9 FM and KCRW.com) is one of the world's leading public radio stations and renowned for its music, news and talk programming.
Additionally, Castfire will manage the serving of metadata for podcasts and downloads, including show notes and cover art, while providing KCRW with detailed delivery metrics. Castfire's open platform has enabled KCRW to seamlessly integrate Castfire services into all parts of the station’s proprietary media player that was built by Digitaria, an interactive agency.
“Publishing shows online with Castfire has exceeded KCRW’s expectations in terms of ease in managing our content online and the sponsorship strategies we wanted to put in place. As traffic to our website, streams and podcasts show significant growth, we need to implement systems that would help drive our online reach and maximize our ability to leverage our deep archives – Castfire’s system has enabled us to do just that.” said Anil Dewan, Director of New Media of KCRW. “After an evaluation of several publishing platforms, we chose Castfire because of their technology, its scalability and the ability to integrate their platform with ours.”
KCRW produces a large number of shows on a weekly basis and it was essential to station managers that the online publishing process didn’t require additional training or work. As a result, KCRW harnessed Castfire’s workflow automation architecture to enable dynamic management of sponsorships on the streams, podcasts and downloads. This means that when a user listens to or watches a show, they're exposed to the latest intros and sponsor message regardless of when the content was first aired/published.
For media companies like KCRW, reporting is critical and Castfire captures data that is required by sponsors and programming managers. Metrics include impressions, geographical information and audience behavior.
"KCRW is a great example of how online media can increase audience size and the value of new and old content” said Brian Walsh, CEO of Castfire. “Now there are regular listeners of KCRW all over the world and the station has the ability to offer sponsorship on every show, regardless of whether it is listened to on a computer or iPod during a commute in LA, Pittsburg, Manhattan or Paris.” Brian continued by saying that “we’re proud of the fact that Castfire completely sits behind the scenes for KCRW powering their archives and podcasts.”
About Castfire, Inc.
Founded in 2005, Castfire provides content management, distribution and monetization tools for audio and video online. Designed for high volume sites with large libraries of content, the system features easy to use interfaces and advanced APIs to allow publishers the ability to reach audiences across multiple platforms and in multiple formats. The robust platform is used by Interactive Agencies and Content Delivery Networks to provide immersive media experiences quickly.
Castfire’s clients include publishers ranging in size from CNET, Federated Media, Next New Networks, Saxotech and leading NFL Teams to episodic indies like AskANinja, BoingBoingTV and Webbalert. The platform works equally well for large and small publishers, and integration can be extremely lightweight or, like KCRW, very deep.
About KCRW-Santa Monica
KCRW-FM, licensed to Santa Monica College, is National Public Radio's flagship station for Southern California. KCRW can be found on the web at KCRW.com. The non-profit is a leading example of how public radio stations are aggressively pushing high-definition radio, live streaming of programs, podcasting and other technology-driven improvements - and in the process demonstrating the potential the internet may hold for all radio stations, public or commercial. Every week, more than 550,000 listeners tune in to hear the station's eclectic and innovative non-commercial program schedule on air. KCRW.com streams more than 1.5 million hours online every month, and listeners download more than 1.3 million audio and video programs per month.
Contact for Castfire:
Robert Kohler – robert at castfire dot com – 415.254.9662
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