Customer Profile
GetBack Media is a broadband entertainment community, content aggregator, and pop culture marketplace defining the spirit of the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s. GetBack lets users rediscover popular entertainment, fashion, and pop-culture moments from their youth, and build community through easy to discover pre-populated content sets related to the music, film and games of the era.
Business Situation
GetBack Media came to H3 Solutions with a need to create a web portal that integrated content from several different content partners as well as their own original content. The amount of content reached the tens of millions and GetBack wanted the ability to customize the user experience based on a single piece of content. A traditional page template structure would not provide the fine-grained tuning that would be required.
GetBack required a content management system (CMS) for original content, as well, that would allow their own content offerings to scale vertically as well as horizontally.
Community features, such as comments, friends, badges and messaging, would also need to be integrated into the experience.
Solution
Site Infrastructure
H3 Solutions built the GetBack web infrastructure from the ground up. The page framework is a combination of templates, skins and modules that can be administered directly from the browser. Skins define what design elements are used, Templates define the page layouts and Modules define what content is displayed. All these components are reusable and can be used in any combination to create unique experiences on a per page basis. This approach saved hundreds of hours of development and provided a very scalable foundation for future development.
Content Aggregation
The GetBack 3rd Party content library consisted of seven different sets of data from seven separate partners including AMG, Screenplay, Warner Music and Sony Music Box. The largest of the content sources was over 60 tables and 80 million records. Content type ranged from textural data to images and videos. H3 Solutions aggregated all the data into a central location and normalized the data to allow for linkage between them. This made it possible for textural content out of one source to be associated with videos out of another.
The final step in content aggregation was to pull out the content that was meaningful to GetBack. This was achieved by providing the GetBack Content team with a capability to create a white list with certain variables and then pull the correct content based on those values. After the white list was run against the data, getback.com had over 500,000 pages of content within Music, Movies and Games. This approach saved hundreds of hours for the content team.
Original Content Management
A major feature of getback.com is the original content that gives it a fresh feel rather than appearing as a big database of content. H3 Solutions developed a flexible CMS that would allow the Content team to add/edit content for each type of Original Content Module as well as add new content types easily. Once the CMS was put in place, the content team went to work quickly adding pieces of original content.
Community Features
The GetBack social features are based around the concept of YearBooks. Features such as inernal site messaging, friend lists, my media and my badges are all included within a user's YearBook pages. Throughout the site, users can collect "badges" and other media to be stored on their YearBook page.
Benefits
Getback.com will be the web destination for all content from the 60s 70s and 80s. From it’s magazine-like hub pages to the depth of content within the detail pages, getback.com delivers an experience unlike any on the web today. The Page framework in conjunction with the Original Content CMS ensure that the site will scale both vertically and horizontally as GetBack continues to publish new content. With all this in place, future integrations, such as Sports and News data, will be vastly simplified.