Digitaria teams with Castfire to create a site that controls all content via APIs

KCRW, one of the leading National Public Radio affiliates, features an eclectic mix of music, news, information and cultural programming. The station boasts one of the nation's largest arrays of locally-produced, nationally-distributed talk program content. KCRW.com extends the station's profile globally with three streams featuring web-exclusive content from KCRWMusic.com, KCRWWorldnews.com, live station simulcast, and extensive podcasts. The non-commercial broadcast signal reaches 550,000 listeners weekly and is supported by 55,000 member/subscribers.

KCRW was an early leader within podcasting, signing Lexus to a very large, multi-month advertising deal across all of their podcasts, a first for the time. As KCRW approaches their third year of podcasting, they are publishing all podcasts and videos from the Castfire platform, including over 8,000 episodes from their archives. This massive process includes encoding to mp3 file format, id3 and meta data management, as well as templating for ad placement.

Publishing shows online with Castfire has exceeded KCRW's expectations in terms of ease in managing our content online and the sponsorship strategies we wanted to put in place. As traffic to our website, streams and podcasts show significant growth, we need to implement systems that would help drive our online reach and maximize our ability to leverage our deep archives - Castfire's system has enabled us to do just that. said Anil Dewan, Director of New Media of KCRW. After an evaluation of several publishing platforms, we chose Castfire because of their technology, its scalability and the ability to integrate their platform with ours.

KCRW has extremely popular live audio streaming content which has gone free since inception because of technology limitations. In launching with Castfire, KCRW not only began serving ads on the streamed content, but will also be geo-targeted, providing their sales force with the opportunity to sell local (Southern California), national and international sponsorships for content. Castfire's ability to provide ad determination and reporting based on geo-targeting was key in KCRW's platform selection.

The Castfire platform is a complete package for publishers and advertisers to connect with audiences through multiple distribution channels and on multiple devices. It is the only platform to combine podcasting and videocasting into a single CMS, providing publishers with granular control over formats, experiences and monetization. The platform offers incredible flexibility for publishers and advertisers alike to reach audiences on their terms of device and time.

According to John Van Spyk, VP of Managed Services at Digitaria, Video has become a must-have requirement for just about every new Digitaria client, and Castfire is our platform of choice. Our developers have written libraries around Castfire's APIs for clients like KCRW which allow rapid deployment and deep integration with website CMS' and ad servers. Castfire is a trusted and valued partner of Digitaria.