Mediacorp

The Client

Mediacorp is Singapore’s largest content creator and national media network, operating six TV channels, 11 radio stations and multiple digital platforms including CNA, Singapore's most used news app, and meWATCH, its digital video platform. Its mission is to engage, entertain and enrich audiences by harnessing the power of creativity.

Mediacorp pioneered the development of Singapore’s broadcasting industry, with radio broadcast in 1936 and television broadcast in 1963. Today, it reaches 98% of Singaporeans in four languages weekly and has a growing Asian audience base through CNA and entertainment content that is distributed across markets in the region. CNA content is consumed by 11 million unique visitors each month, generating about 75 million page views monthly. The channel also reaches more than 81 million households in 29 territories across Asia, the Middle East and Australia.

The Situation

Mediacorp fully transitioned its print publications to the digital space in 2000. However, this transition resulted in multiple CMS platforms and versions across the organization, including an enterprise proprietary CMS platform. Though the current CMS platform had worked in many areas for years, things were changing so fast that Mediacorp was experiencing more issues than ever before with managing content.

The Challenge

Mediacorp faced limited options on CMS vendors, resulting in high cost of implementation, licensing and support. The previous CMS provider had shifted their product roadmap to no longer be publishing-focused, resulting in a lack of support for Mediacorp’s growing requirements, including more complex workflows in content management, creation, curation, reusing and sharing.

Additionally, engineering efficiencies were not met as Mediacorp was on a difficult path to upgrade their product version due to rigid design architecture and poor scalability. Limited support from professional services (including slow releases of new features and security updates that made them vulnerable to many issues) and the lack of community support also meant that intensive effort was needed for changes and customizations.

The Solution

Mediacorp’s process for evaluating a new CMS was a joint effort by their digital and editorial teams. They considered not only specific functionalities, but overall cost, editorial experience and engineering efficiencies. They went through a few rounds of assessments:

• They referenced Gartner's report on the Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) to look for leading providers.
• They also visited some global media publishers to get insights from their experiences with past and present CMS platforms.
• They requested demo sessions from a few providers, and evaluated from both the editorial and engineering perspectives.
• They then requested a proof-of-concept setup from a few providers, and evaluated further.

In the end, Mediacorp decided on using Drupal as it addresses their key evaluation criteria on cost, editorial experience and engineering efficiency in a more balanced way. And after they started using Drupal, they discovered Acquia and its complementing services and support.

The Results

Although Mediacorp’s replatforming project is still in progress, they already have several sites running on Drupal through Acquia Cloud Platform. Leveraging Acquia to manage their infrastructure from A to Z, Acquia has helped Mediacorp improve its scalability, server provisioning, patching, CI / CD processes, and more. This has enabled Mediacorp to focus on its application development, achieving great results with a lean team.

Acquia’s Technical Account Management (TAM) team has also been a great help with their expertise in the Drupal domain, giving Mediacorp much more visibility and influence in Drupal’s roadmap. On top of providing effective consultation and recommendations, Acquia provides the direction and guidance on deep contextual application analysis, design, support and infrastructure planning. 

Acquia’s global support team also provides 24/7 monitoring — covering infrastructure, site availability and more — and proactively takes action to fix issues and keep Mediacorp updated. Mediacorp saw tremendous value in Drupal when they deployed TodayOnline. As they are currently moving all their sites to Drupal, they envision themselves to be on a single platform with a common code base to be able to develop once and use anywhere, with integrations with various managed services. Mediacorp aims to build various components and capabilities through Acquia and Drupal’s multisite design to power the ability to create content (including news articles, images, videos or audio) once and use it anywhere by various product teams. Since replatforming to Drupal, Mediacorp has seen its digital news site, TODAY, reach an average of 22 million page views per month in 2019.