What it means as well is that we get the benefit of a broad distributed group of developers that are making improvement to the system all the time. We’ve built a lot of custom modules, which we give back and share with the Drupal community, which is how it works in the spirit of open source. Grubstreet: So you must be customising Drupal to your heart’s content then? There have been great advances in open-source web technologies and so far we’ve been very happy. That would have been unheard of a few years ago (for a large operation). Our CMS (content-management system) is an area we thought long and hard about and we ultimately decided to go with an open-source CMS. We’re using Amazon Web Services for our website and a business called Kaltura to deliver video because we couldn’t really find a suitable scalable solution in the current South African ISP market – and it was also very expensive (in SA). So that’s another thing that we’ve done a little different to how we might have approached things a couple of years ago: we’re actually hosting on an international CDN both for video and for the rest of the site. And not only is the access slow but it’s expensive in comparison with more developed markets.Īlso, it’s not only the end-user bandwidth but the bandwidth from ISPs (internet service providers) is very expensive. You can’t really believe this can still be happening in 2013. Grubstreet: Ja, one still encounters buffering while viewing video. Up until this point – and, quite frankly, if we’ve even reached this point is questionable – there have been constraints in terms of broadband penetration in South Africa.Īnd while this is changing, the fact is that the market would have been so niche that it wouldn’t have made commercial sense for us to launch a video-rich online presence (before now). The other one – and it goes back to your original point, which is: ‘Why has it taken us so long to launch any kind of online presence?’ – and I think it really goes to the fact that as a broadcaster we see our strength as being in video content. But certainly I would say we have a greater understanding of the importance of it than maybe some of the other players do. Having said that, I wouldn’t necessarily say that we’re the best in the market. We try to integrate our content as much as we can into social platforms. Spira: Well, the one thing we’ve been very conscious of is social-media integration so we draw quite a bit of content from social media.
I think we’re trying to take the lessons where we can and I’d like to think that in certain areas we’ve been able to leapfrog. But, at the same time, one can approach it with a very contemporary mind set and with a better view of current realities of online media than some of the competitor sites – because they were developed a while ago and have had to adapt to the innovations like the prevalence of social media and the increasing appeal of multimedia content… There are a lot of entrenched players out there that are doing very well so you need to effectively take market share away from them. Coming in this late in the game is a double-edged sword. You can set up and run online with the benefit of lots of past digital learning. Grubstreet: So it’s weird that it took eNCA so long to get online but I guess the great thing for you is that you’re starting from a position of knowledge.
Grubstreet spoke to Spira last week to find out more about why it took so long for eNCA to establish an online presence and what mistakes they hope to avoid by coming to the party so late.
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In fact, eNCA only launched its site – under GM Tim Spira – in April this year.īut even with eNCA still in the process of establishing its brand (the change was necessitated by the launch of a UK channel on the Sky pay-TV platform in August last year), the site’s numbers are exceeding its own expectations: at more than 270 000 domestic users in May, which was its first full month of in existence. By Gill Moodie ( and online seem to be such a happy fit so it has always perplexed me that eNews Channel Africa – or eNCA (previously eNews) – went for so long without a proper website.
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