As one of the world’s leading news brands, with millions of unique visitors every day, the NBC News Digital has a reputation for delivering timely, compelling, diverse and visually engaging stories. Because they strive to deliver the best original journalism, commentary and local updates to popular mobile devices — their workflow issues were paramount. When the NBC News Digital first entered the world of mobile video delivery, it went with a fairly turn-key solution for handling video delivery to a range of devices, and monetizing that content. As the network’s needs grew — and especially when it later entered app development for the iPad and other higher-end devices — its provider's limitations with content ingestion, ad stitching and analytics were resulting in lost monetization opportunities and business agility. NBC News Digital needed a solution that allowed for a greater level of flexibility, performance, speed, and reporting capability for both ad and mobile video delivery.

Additionally, the NBC News Digital did not have the ability to manipulate ads without re-transcoding every piece of content and as a result, they wanted greater visibility into transcoding status in order to increase their ROI and maximize yields.With so many visitors demanding immediate, high quality media on hundreds of device types, the NBC News Digital also wanted the ability to manipulate an asset so that only specific segments of a media item could be published on different devices for maximum profitability.


When our team sat down with the NBC News Digital, we found that we were well-equipped to provide a solution that addressed all of their needs. Our Unicorn Once™ technology integrated seamlessly with their existing environment and CDN allowing them to take immediate advantage of components that provide a much more sophisticated and streamlined workflow. Unicorn Once™ allows content owners like NBC News Digital to ingest media one time and deliver everywhere with dynamic ad integration and real-time analytics across any Internet-connected device.

By incorporating Unicorn Once™, NBC News Digital has been able to take advantage of our dynamic ad integration technology. They are able to integrate their own complex set of algorithms directly with the Unicorn Once™ platform to determine the best monetization strategy on a request by request basis; whether for personalization, utilizing various sites and zones, maximizing ad inventory yield, etc. all in real-time, without the need for re-transcoding content.

Unicorn Once™ made an impact almost instantaneously, exponentially increased content quality and speed of delivery, greatly improving the user experience. In fact, NBC News Digital was able to monetize their Roku content for the first time ever.

NBC News Digital simply provided a file with all the metadata associated and through our content synchronization tool, we allowed them to use their existing publishing workflows for everything from their mobile website to their mobile applications. There were no customer facing changes other than a higherquality output, asset availability per device and speed-of-play. The simple, behind the scenes integration exponentially increased the speed of publishing, increased ad revenue and reduced costs across multiple divisions.

Additionally, NBC News Digital now has the ability to take a smaller segment from a full length clip and deliver it for mobile devices as if it were a pre-edited clip simply by manipulating the query string, eliminating the need to perform post-production editing. They are able to break the clip down using nothing more than metadata to determine which slices will be pulled from the asset, then publish it to any device with dynamic ad integration, regardless of whether it is a progressive download or HLS streaming.

Unicorn Media also supplied a transcode status tool to address NBC News Digital's need for interactivity with ad publishing. The tool gives them direct visibility into the state of an asset. As the proper version of an asset is transcoded they can publish it immediately, which greatly improved their time-to-market. And, since this can be done instantaneously, they can use our analytics to monitor the best possible strategy for their campaign and make adjustments in real-time to maximize their ROI. Unicorn Media also provides NBC News Digital with real-time analytics through Unicorn Once Reporting™, allowing them to monitor content performance to maximize profitability. Unicorn Once ReportingTM allows them to see how their content is performing on a device level.

Unicorn Once Reporting™ provides analytics that reflect the usage of a given asset or catalog of assets across all the ways in which it is being delivered. For instance, the performance of a mobile app vs. the page on the mobile website is extremely useful data for NBC News Digital's marketing group, operations teams and advertisers. With this information they can physically see where users are viewing and tailor that experience accordingly. Knowing first-hand how one mobile app is performing as a whole, how that app is performing on the iPhone or the Android or mobile web page directly translates to dollars earned vs. dollars spent, information that was never available before.

"We thoroughly enjoyed working with the Unicorn team. They were open, honest and had an extremely high level of technical expertise and flexibility,” said JoAnne Kennedy, Vice President of Technology at the NBC News Digital. “I am particularly happy with the sophistication of their platform which allows us to easily target and track video advertising across our mobile sites and apps, deploy a time-based ad tracking system and quickly scale delivery of our online video products."

Download PDF: Unicorn Media Case Study - NBC News Digital



To find out how Unicorn Media can monetize your content, please contact us at (480) 214-6464 or salesinfo@unicornmedia.com.