Georgia Public Broadcasting provides programming that includes statewide radio news, current affairs and educational resources via nine television stations, 18 radio stations and a website.
The broadcaster was already using StreamGuys’ SGrecast SaaS platform to manage their podcast publishing workflows. They decided to add SGrecast’s new API for seamless integration with their website content management system. The integration simplified operations by unifying GPB’s audio publishing, storage and delivery processes.
Prior to the new integration, GPB used two distinct workflows for different types of audio content. SGrecast was used only for pre-produced podcast episodes. The operators uploaded them directly into SGrecast along with corresponding metadata for automated publishing and distribution. Non-podcast audio clips, such as sound bites and story reads that accompany articles on GPB’s news website, were handled separately. When the broadcaster merged its dedicated news portal into the main site last year, the team took the opportunity to combine its behind-the-scenes audio processes.
“Our main GPB.org site wasn’t set up to serve audio files, so we needed a good place to host its new audio content,” said Carl Zornes, director of digital media at GPB. “Bringing our podcasts and news audio clips together in our website CMS would also remove some manual steps for our podcast producers.”
GPB and its website developers, Lullabot, used StreamGuys’ just-released API to let producers and news reporters submit both podcasts and general audio content to SGrecast through the same CMS interface.
A second SGrecast integration simplifies the creation of website landing pages for GPB’s podcasts.
GPB’s new API-driven audio publishing workflow went live in June 2020, just as demand for their digital content took off. “With students learning from home because of the pandemic, our partnership with our State Department of Education is bringing more people to our website,” said Zornes. “We also stream live press conferences for our Governor and Secretary of State, and with Georgia’s key role in the 2020 elections, all eyes and ears have been on our state. It has been a banner year for our content.”
GPB’s key initiatives for 2021 include further expansion of these distribution outlets, with plans to add Google News and Apple News alongside roughly 20 existing partnerships that include Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.
