Storytelling Platform for Content Distribution

Business challenge

Playbuzz is an online media company with offices across the globe, including in Israel, the United States, Germany, Brazil, and Ukraine. They offer a multimedia storytelling platform for creating and publishing content in popular formats like slideshows, quizzes, polls, countdowns, and video snippets.

Their digital content distribution platform enables advertisers, publishers, brands, and individual content creators to craft captivating and interactive content and distribute it to websites, mobile apps, and social networks. Playbuzz analytics tools assist with data-driven content decisions by estimating content performance and analyzing readers’ behaviors and preferences. Content owners can monetize their content by adding sponsored content labels and embedding call-to-action buttons.

Founded in 2012, Playbuzz has been nominated as one of the most disruptive media businesses. Their digital storytelling platform boasts 6 billion analytics events, over 500 million of page views, and over 300 million active users per month. Over 10,000 publishers, including leading media industry players like The New York Times, MTV, The BBC, Time Magazine, and Disney rely on our client’s platform to reach their commercial and editorial goals.

A young team of technopreneurs set up Playbuzz in 2012. They were driven by a vision to transform the way people consume content on the web. They wanted to make content more engaging, interactive, and profitable. And they succeeded. Their online publishing platform was rapidly adopted by major global publishers and brands.

But staying in the lead in the highly competitive digital media market requires constant innovation no matter what heights have already been reached. And at one point, our client’s deadlines and volume of development required to cover all the product backlog items became untenable. Due to a shortage of machine learning developers and engineers with the necessary skillsets on the internal Israeli market, Playbuzz’s Tel Aviv R&D center started experiencing scalability problems. Playbuzz needed to find a culturally proximate partner to scale their 30+ FTE engineering capacity with a dedicated development team to fasten their digital content distribution software to the market.

Technology solution

Within weeks of the contract signing ceremony in 2017, Intellias put together a viable engineering team to serve as an integral part of our client’s Tel Aviv R&D center. We increased the development capacity of Playbuzz’s small in-house Agile teams, each of which is responsible for an individual component of the digital storytelling software.

Intellias complemented our client’s teams, which were working on the frontend, backend, video editing tools, content monetization mechanisms, data processing, microservices, and databases. Contingent upon workload expectations, we added from one to four skilled technicians to each team, including software, DevOps, test automation, machine learning, and support engineers. Given the complexity and priority of tasks within the scope of digital content management system development, we provided strong middle to senior technical experts.

Playbuzz has delegated a notable part of their core team’s tasks to Intellias. Our backend engineers are working on implementing new features and improvements to the digital media distribution system, CMS and social network integrations, caching layers, and more. We’re also in a continuous process of enhancing performance and scalability in view of the platform’s large global audience, which is topping half a billion end users and growing.

In tight cooperation with Ukrainian and Israeli stakeholders, Intellias test automation engineers are developing and executing both manual and automated test cases on a large-scale web environment. Our DevOps engineers help keep the AWS-based continuous integration and continuous development environments healthy and provide regular feedback and reports to stakeholders.

As our team has continued to grow in size along with the number of backlog tasks assigned to us, we’ve introduced a project coordinator who helps bridge the Intellias and Israeli teams, provide status reports, monitor product quality against predefined KPIs, and supply ongoing support to users, partners, and field representatives worldwide.

Business impact

Intellias has provided digital platform consulting and organized a co-branded working environment for our client’s dedicated team, fully recreating the unified corporate style of all Playbuzz locations. Currently, our team counts 12 engineers, and we’re in the process of expanding it.

Intellias has offered the following as part of our Intelligent Dedicated Team service:

• Access to a talent pool of ~1,000 in-house engineers and 70,000+ engineers on the Ukrainian talent market
• Full control over a remote team that’s completely dedicated to Playbuzz storytelling software
• Easy administration, with all contract work, payroll operations, team setup, employee retention, and other business processes covered
• Excellent infrastructure with modern office buildings that offer a creative and inspiring work environment
• Talent management, facilitating product knowledge transfers to align remote software developers with the in-house team
• Delivery management, including measuring dedicated team productivity and monitoring product quality
• Consulting services relating to gap analysis, Agile transformation, business analysis, software architecture, and more