Hosting talkback radio online

Application outsourcing specialist Hostworks recently won a three-year contract to guarantee the availability of Mytalk.com.au, Australia’s first national talk radio and music online portal.

Launched in April by Prime Minister John Howard, Mytalk is one of the first major initiatives from Southern Cross View, the online division of leading Australian media company Southern Cross Broadcasting.

The Prime Minister described the project as “the dual presentation of both an innovative web page but also the duplication of it as a data casting service on digital television … that is an Australian first.”

With major radio stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and around 30 TV stations in regional areas, Southern Cross Broadcasting is able to reach up to 90 percent of Australia’s population. Top-rating talk stations include 4BC, 6PR, 3AW with Neil Mitchell and 2UE with John Laws.

Mytalk aggregates the digital content assets from Southern Cross Broadcasting’s seven radio stations as well as its television regions into a single portal that provides audiences with easy online access, advertisers with national reach and Southern Cross Broadcasting with a profitable online business.

Set up in November 2006, Southern Cross View manages the digital assets of Southern Cross Broadcasting. Its core focus is to develop and bring to market products that enable Southern Cross Broadcasting to have a significant online presence that provides revenue growth, complements the existing distribution channels and is profitable.

Hostworks is a service provider of enterprise application outsourcing, delivering business systems with guaranteed availability. Mytalk aggregates digital data and video feeds from Southern Cross radio and TV stations through its Canberra Network Operations Centre. Content is then stored on media publishing servers at a Hostworks data centre, from which it is delivered to the web.

There it goes again
Southern Cross View general manager Kim Anderson said Mytalk had performed better than expected during its first month. So well that news stories such as the deaths of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock and the recent Karrang train accident and the shooting on Melbourne streets caused the online service to crash.

“We are significantly ahead of expectations in terms of page impressions, registered members and unique visitors,” she said. “Mytalk is the equivalent of talkback radio for the web. People are getting online and having their say. It builds our audience and gives localised news and current affairs.

According to Simon Revelman, technical director at Southern Cross View, Southern Cross had a tight deadline.“We had to get MyTalk up and ready within four months because it was going to be launched by the Prime Minister. You can’t remove an appointment with the Prime Minister,” he said.

After a request for tender period of two months the broadcaster chose enterprise outsourcing specialist Hostworks to provide the technical infrastructure and services to ensure Mytalk is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“We narrowed it to four service providers, including Hostworks,” he said. “We negotiated and worked out the best scope for the amount of servers and network bandwidth that we would need for Mytalk and Hostworks came with best offer.”

To outsource or not to outsource
It was very important for Southern Cross Broadcasting to outsource the project — it didn’t have space internally, nor the expertise and staff, said Revelman.

“If we had internal staff we would have needed to employ someone who could offer network operations centre skill, and someone who had experience on Windows, SQL etc. Hostworks already had all the staff and capabilities that would’ve taken us years to get together,” he said.

The project was finished in a short few days, staff maintained the old site and had new content on the site by working on dual content on both sites.

Klaus Bartosch, sales and marketing director at Hostworks said this win was about more than just Mytalk. Hostworks has been chosen by Southern Cross View as its “application management” and “hosting partner”, with Mytalk being the first project.

Hostworks has a wealth of experience in meeting peak demand for customers including Australia’s most popular online destination ninemsn. Hostworks worked with Southern Cross View to design a communications infrastructure that provided a robust platform for integrating digital data feeds from diverse radio and TV stations into Mytalk and then streaming it to the web.

“Anticipating the level of audience demand for an online media service is always a challenge. The problem is creating the infrastructure to meet occasional, hard-to-predict peaks can inflict a high financial and operational overhead on a business,” said Bartosch. “Southern Cross View wanted Mytalk to meet these demand peaks without missing a beat within a budget that enabled the company to achieve predictable costs and a profitable business model.”

Solving the problems
According to Bartosch, the optimal solution was for Mytalk to aggregate data feeds through its Canberra Network Operations Centre. Content is then stored on media publishing servers with comprehensive Hostworks managed services and located at a Hostworks data centre, from which it is delivered to the web.

The service provider assisted Southern Cross View to choose the right content publishing platform, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, running on the Windows Server 2003 operating system with the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. Streaming services are provided by Windows Media Player.

It then deployed three HP DL 380 or DL 385 servers for Mytalk, comprising two web servers and one database server. Streaming services are delivered by a shared server elsewhere in the Hostworks infrastructure, said Bartosch.

Hostworks had two major phases in the project; the ‘Design’ phase involved working with Southern Cross View to help define its business requirements about how to deliver Mytalk over the Internet. This included Hostworks helping Southern Cross View choose the right application and systems integrator for that platform.

The ‘Deploy’ phase involved Hostworks setting up the environment, migrating the legacy Mytalk site into MOSS 2007 and then managing it with the web database and streaming services.

“The initial piece of work was to migrate the Mytalk site into MOSS 2007 without any service disruption for the Mytalk audience,” said Bartosch. “From our perspective, the most exciting aspect was our involvement in providing an end-to-end solution. We started with developing the business requirements needed to present themselves on the web, we identified the right technology, found the appropriate partner and then took it right through to packaging up our specialist managed services to meet their business needs.”

Being a good host
According to Bartosch, Hostworks typically engages very deeply with its customers around business and technology requirements. This project required two people all the way through on business requirements.

“Once we got into the deployment phases, we had a minimum of three people working on the project, although we drew on a range of specialists as required from across our business throughout the process as needed,” he said.

While the number of staff varies from project to project, having two people on the MyTalk project was a “typical approach”.

Mytalk now delivers one of the most significant radio streaming services in the country, evident in the profile of its radio stations. Mytalk further extends Hostworks’ position as the Australian leader in online media with the ability to deliver uninterrupted services that meet record peaks in demand.

According to Revelman, Hostworks implementation team did an outstanding task of setting up the new service.

“Hostworks was helpful and communicative throughout the project,” he said. “This was a real partnership, I have been in game for eight years and dealt with service providers where I have been the one to find a problem and had to notify them. Working with Hostworks means no more calls at 4am about something going wrong.”

SOUTHERN CROSS VIEW
• Fifty percent increase in productive use of all staff time;
• Increase in the total number of clients with no need to increase staffing levels;
• Ability to provide clients with the new feature of a weekly report.

“You can’t remove an appointment with the Prime Minister.”