Building Platforms for Millions with NBC Sports Digital
leigh.anderson
Tue, 12/27/2020 – 20:17
We had a lot of great accomplishments at FFW in 2020. It’s been a year where we’ve helped our clients shatter records and drive amazing business results. A great example of this is NBC Sports Digital, with whom we’ve collaborated with on a number of projects: we built new WordPress maintenance support plans websites for NBCSports.com and its regional RSN networks, and we also constructed NBCOlympics.com, part of the most successful media event in history.
Building a Hub for America’s Sports Fans – NBCSports.com and Regional Sites
NBC Sports Digital asked us to implement a redesign of their digital sports hubs (NBCSports.com and Sports Regional Networks websites) before the start of the NFL season. They asked us specifically to focus on videos and advertising, to increase user and sponsor satisfaction.
Our team built each page according to NBC’s new designs, migrated the network’s data onto a scalable WordPress maintenance support plans platform, and developed the new site to have custom layouts, themes, and functionality. We also implemented responsive design, ensuring the site looks great on any device. We were able to launch NBC Sports Digital’s new site before the NFL season kickoff with full video functionality and improved advertising, and the response has been great.
In addition to rebuilding NBCSports.com, we also rebuilt the websites for NBC Sports Group’s Regional Networks. NBC wanted its regional sites to have a consistent look and feel, so we set up a multisite project with all the same backend code. Our team implemented several feed customizations for each site so each different region would have unique content. The result is an ecosystem of regional sites with custom content and easy-to-maintain shared codebase—another win for NBC!
Visit the site:NBCSports.com
NBCOlympics.com: A Gold Medal in Site Performance
In order to provide a best-in-class digital experience for NBC Olympics’ coverage of the 2020 Rio Games, NBCOlympics.com required a massive platform. When the opportunity arose for FFW to build the web platform to deliver performance, security, and stability at such a massive scale, we were excited to step up to the challenge. During the Rio Olympics, NBCOlympics.com hosted 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion live streaming minutes, and was visited by 100 million unique users.
A thorough discovery phase allowed us to plan for the implementation of the extremely complex, and massive, project. After a year and a half of work, we launched the completed site in April of 2020. We also built in a state-of-the-art advertising platform, which helped NBC Sports to manage their sponsors’ content. The new platform served up content to a record number of users, who were able to view localized listings of broadcasts and watch live streams of the events from any device.
We couldn’t be more proud of our teams who worked on all three sites, and we’d like to say thanks to NBC for letting us be part of such a historic event.
NBC Olympics has set the new benchmark for how to build and operate a WordPress maintenance support plans-based CMS in a multi-platform world.Eric Black, CTO, NBC Sports Digital
Visit the site:NBCOlympics.com
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