Kick-off for synergies

Swisscom Office

…supports and enables open innovation within Swisscom and builds an ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship. It acts as community and innovation platform and expert within Swisscom as one of the biggest swiss companies as well as the swiss and international economy. The Pirates Hub takes the role as bridge builder to entrepreneurs, startups and experts. With an iterative, fast and agile innovation process it establishes collaboration between start- and scaleups and Swisscom.

The Challenge

The newsroom faced the challenge that editors were unhappy with their current system, Adobe CQ5. The system caused huge lags in its setup, keeping editors waiting for minutes before an article could be published. In addition, they imported a lot of articles from news agencies and once the importer was running hot (about twice a day) the whole system could become unresponsive for up to 30 minutes, leaving editors idling around waiting for timeouts to cease. All in all, a lot of productivity was lost.

Livingdocs first came to Bluewin’s attention at Pirates Hub, the innovation hub of Swisscom. A first pitch was organized. Seeing the components move around on the page in real-time, content being edited inline and published in a matter of milliseconds, Bluewin’s head of portal was hooked. In the summer of 2016, he asked Livingdocs to implement a proof of concept for the TV&Entertainment section of bluewin.ch.

Kick-off

The Livingdocs team delivered. Not only did the TV section work seamlessly within Livingdocs. On top, Livingdocs incorporated an improved design that Bluewin’s designer Ron had in mocks for over a year but was never able to apply to the live page. So together, we decided to take the brave step and suggest a replacement of Adobe CQ5 within Swisscom’s large organization that was just about to harmonize systems towards Adobe.

Breaking news on all topics from politics to sports.

Normalize 15 different news feeds into one format.

Import over 1000 articles per day.

Create genuine content and alter imported articles. Set rules for content arrangement and overwrite manually.

CMS component that handles everything from user management to document versioning.

CMS component optimised for fast rendering and delivery of content.

Integrated with the bluewin mail client, catches readers attention while their checking their mail.

Swisscom home entertainment system with over 2 Million sold set-top boxes in Switzerland.

Scalable frontend application that builds the finished page bluewin.ch with ads and analytics.

A/B testing.

Livingdocs is the new backbone for Swisscom's News & Entertainment branch. The delivery encompases a mobile E-Mail client, a web news portal and a TV set-top-box.

My newsroom works with thousands of documents every day. Thanks to Livingdocs this not only became a lot faster but also a lot more fun.

Cyrill Treptow,
Head of Bluewin

Unsurprisingly, a large enterprise such as Swisscom proceeded with caution. But within a couple of months, we won a growing group of Livingdocs supporters at Swisscom, strong enough to make the change happen.

At the beginning, supporting Bluewin was quite a challenge. At that point, Livingdocs was a system geared towards newspaper publishing, still lacking some of the functionality a portal required. We built an automatic importer queue that could easily handle 1000 news agency articles per day backed by sophisticated rule sets to automatically place, cross-link and advertise the content on the page. Timed scheduling and push notifications were incorporated as well.

With over 1000 news feed articles coming in per day, automated rule sets for content arrangement and scheduling were very important to Bluewin.

Moreover, the portal faced another challenge that we were to help with. Bluewin needed to shift its business model, as it relied heavily on ads and margins in the ad market were shrinking. What we developed together is a novelty in the German speaking news world and to our knowledge world-wide. Read on.

A well played long ball

Swisscom provides the biggest set-top box TV offer for end-users in Switzerland. They managed to acquire the rights for a great sports program, with UHD transmission of the FIFA soccer World Cup and full rights on all games of the UEFA Champions League among others. Sports is becoming a major driver for Swisscom TV.

And that is exactly where the Bluewin news desk came in. Swisscom envisioned a system that uses Bluewin’s editorial content to enrich and highlight the Swisscom TV sport offerings. They called it content dossiers. The benefit is mutual: Bluewin gets a completely new business model by increasing TV subscriptions and Swisscom TV gets an edge over other OTT and internet-TV providers such as Netflix with innovative editorial content.

Swisscom uses Livingdocs to edit TV screens. Content dossiers give TV watchers an enhanced experience and engaging content at the click of a TV remote.

Extra time

Bluewin has been productively using Livingdocs since January 2018 across all three newsrooms in the German, French and Italian speaking parts of Switzerland. The software for the Swisscom TV dossiers was launched on May 23 2018 and it was fully visible to all Swisscom TV subscribers starting with the soccer World Cup in Russia on June 14. And our journey with Swisscom continued: Following autumn the UEFA Champions League started with lots of great content offerings and Bluewin has since had a whole bag full of ideas to bring sport news in Switzerland to the next level.

Kick-off for Swisscom TV's use of Livingdocs was the FIFA world cup 2018 in Russia. Swisscom TV acquired rights for UHD transmission of the games and uses Livingdocs to highlight their offer.