ROOS consortium

Drupal, the perfect toolkit for your media website? Sure thing!

Krimson and DOP teamed up with the video-platform specialists at Bluebilly Wig to build a generic, white-label Drupal install for the regional TV and radio broadcasters in the Netherlands.

Via the consortium ROOS (Stichting Regionale Omroep Overleg en Samenwerking), 13 (!) agencies collaborate on a broad range of activities, a.o. their websites. The consortium chose Drupal as its web publishing platform.

The two pioneers among the broadcaster for this webproject are RTV West and Omroep Zeeland. During spring 2011, we implemented and launched their websites using the white-label Drupal install.

Technical

At the start of the project, the main focus was maximum flexibility and a minimum extra effort for the editors to publish their content to the web from their newsroom software. The sites are based upon Pressflow - the high performance Drupal distribution.
A generic importer was built so every broadcaster can link their newsroom software to the Drupal site. All newscontent, images, video & audio gets imported into Drupal via this connector. A second connector pushes this information from Drupal to the VMS portal of Bluebilly Wig to encode the mediafiles for web-playback. Video and audio are played through the custom ROOS-videoplayer, built by Bluebilly Wig.

This way editors are hardly confronted with the Drupal backend. Most of the content comes throughout these import connectors. Apart from that a flexible theming template was built to be able to implement very different looking websites for each broadcaster.

Keep track of the other broadcasters of the ROOS consortium: in the upcoming months they will launch their renewed websites, based on the ROOS/white-label Drupal CMS!