Mansueto Digital: FastCompany and Inc. Case Study

Magazine publisher adds video to the written work

Mansueto Ventures is a publishing company dedicated to serving the business leaders who are shaping the future of today's economy. Founded in 2005 when Joe Mansueto bought Inc. and Fast Company from Gruner + Jahr, the company's flagship magazines target different audiences, but share similar challenges and goals. Their readers, customers, and community members are significant influencers and number more than two million. Through a full complement of print, online, events, custom publishing and integrated marketing solutions, Mansueto Ventures offers the world's leading advertisers the unique ability to build its brands and move its products within the fast-growing business sector.

TV ... on the Web

Inc. and Fast Company magazines have been veritable powerhouses in their respective markets for years. In early 2007, parent company Mansueto Ventures announced the formation of Mansueto Digital, a new division devoted to aggressively growing the company's digital presence, including leading sites Inc.com, FastCompany.com, and IncTechnology.com. In addition to enhancing the existing online properties, the Digital division was charged with building new properties.

One of those new properties, FastCompany.tv, was the first Mansueto site to leverage the Twistage video solution. Twistage's API-driven approach paid real dividends as the video experience – in terms of publishing, managing, and viewing – was seamlessly integrated into Drupal, a leading open-source content management system. Having a single administrative interface made the video components of FastCompany.tv accessible to both technical and non-technical people alike.

The success of the integration ultimately resulted in a wholesale migration of video content to Twistage, which now powers video for a broad array of Mansueto properties, including Inc.com and FastCompany.com.

Multiple Properties, One Video Solution

A technologically progressive media company, Mansueto had already implemented other video solutions on several of their websites. However, when it came to FastCompany.tv, the company elected to work with Twistage. The tightness of integration and robust feature set made Twistage a natural fit when Mansueto ultimately upgraded the video experience on its other web properties.

API

Customizability is key and an area where Twistage truly excels. Customers aren't bounded by rigid templates, workflows, or other unbending technical requirements. The API – the veritable foundation of the Twistage platform – offers unprecedented tightness of integration and customization of the experience. By writing a Drupal module, the Mansueto development team was able to bring Twistage right into their CMS while also re-using components they had already built.

High Quality

Much of Mansueto's content, and nearly all of FastCompany.tv's videos, are shot in HD. Since the typical household doesn't have sufficient bandwidth to consume 10 or 20 megabits per second, video transcoding plays a critical role in the overall user experience. Twistage's transcoding engine supports multiple input and output formats and gives customers tight control over the size and quality of the video. Using cutting edge codecs and encoding techniques, the platform is able to produce high quality videos at remarkably low bitrates.

White Label

Since Mansueto manages multiple brands, it's vital that its video solution support its efforts to maintain different brand identities. Twistage allows businesses to logically segment content as well as apply distinct branding for each web property that displays the video. And with no intrusive visual elements from Twistage, companies can rest assured that they are promoting their own brand – and not their video provider's.

"Very much a true white label, with an API that our developers have been happy with, and providing many transcoding features on the server-side that other providers forced me to do on my own. Our integration with Drupal has proven quite easy. I should also say they've been great to work with, custom building iTunes/podcast features at my request. The quality of the transcodes, and a good set of features that falls between building from scratch and a more canned service are the killers for me."

Michael Shick
Senior Multimedia Producer, Mansueto Digital

Building on the Foundation

Mansueto developers are meticulously working to enhance the video experience across all of the company's web properties. They are aided, in large part, by the Twistage iterative development model where new features and capabilities are released several times a month. This provides them the tools to stay ahead in a fast-changing market.