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Success Story

Daffodil helps Zee Entertainment to successfully launch its first radio station in the UAE in a short span of time

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Zee Entertainment is a global media and entertainment conglomerate with a strong presence across television broadcasting, movies, music, live entertainment and digital businesses. Spread over 173 countries, connecting and entertaining over 1.3 billion people globally, ZEE has been powering the Media & Entertainment space across the world for over 27 years.

  • 5x faster release cycle
  • 20% cost optimization for feature releases
  • 350 hours of development efforts saved
  • 7 full stack developers deployed

The Situation

Radio had been an area of interest for ZEE Entertainment in order to diversify their entertainment portfolio in the Middle East. After an extensive planning and studying of the brand values, ratings and revenue generated by various stations, Zee Entertainment acquired the most popular FM in the Middle East, Hum FM and re-branded it to 106.2 Big FM. In order to connect the Indian community in the UAE with Indian music and Music Jockeys (MJs) on their platform, Zee Entertainment planned to develop a dedicated mobile app for 106.2 Big FM.

Zee Entertainment approached Daffodil Software to transform their vision of a radio streaming application into a market fit product. They needed a technology partner who could proactively contribute to design and ideation of their application, rather than just provide development services. Zee Entertainment chose Daffodil for our best cost/value balance, and extensive experience in media streaming application development. The requirement was to:

  • Develop a radia streaming application that could stream music live and enable listeners to connect with their favorite MJs. This included keeping a tab on program schedules by MJs, their latest videos, and details of current and upcoming songs.
  • To integrate third party analytics and monitoring tools with the application in order to keep a track on user behavior and application performance.
  • To launch the application in a strict timelines and set up a continuous integration and delivery pipeline in order to make frequent updates to the application in a short span of time.

The Solution

The engagement started with the Daffodil team setting up a strategic requirement gathering process in place. This was done through our unique Discover & Frame workshop, wherein we document app ideas, target market, persona, business model, competition, revenue streams, etc. This helps us get a clear understanding of what is the client’s expectations and effectively develop a project roadmap. Once all the aforementioned aspects were documented, our expert business analyst team analyzed the application requirements, created user stories, feature lists, process flow diagrams and clickable prototypes of the application. On the techno-commercial front, they suggested the most viable technology stack, identified third party tools and Integration and proposed a block level architecture of the application.

In the next step, Daffodil team mapped the requirements onto the technology landscape, developing and deploying a scalable architecture for the application. Our UX experts applied design thinking techniques to build an interactive customer experience and create a compelling, transparent user interface for the app.

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The biggest constraint in the project was its restricted timeline. To overcome the challenges that this constraint brought along, team Daffodil adopted some smart workarounds to improve the time-to-market of the project. The initial requirement included native app development for Android and iOS platforms. However, to set the apps live within a limited timeline (within 2–3 weeks), we recommended the client to roll out a cross-platform native app development using React Native technology.

During the development phase, many ad hoc features were added to the project. To cope with the ever-changing requirements (functional and technical), our development team switched from scrum to Leanban model for project management. Leanban supports change at a sustainable pace, guided by lean practices at team-level.

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We also incorporated DevOps into the mobile app development cycle and set up a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, integrated with project management tools for each release to be deployed over Android (HockeyApp) and iTunes (TestFlight). For audio and video streaming of the content, a custom streaming media player was developed.using a reusable React Native component that streams live audio content. A custom media notification tray with controls was also developed to manage audio streaming during app background. Also, for tracking app-user behavior for the marketing and data analytics team, we integrated third-party analytics and reporting tools such as custom Google Firebase components which were integrated with Google Tag Manager. We also integrated the application with Crash Analytics tools like Fabric.io for 24 x 7 crash monitoring and reporting.

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The Impact

Zee Entertainment was able to launch and market the product in a timely manner as Daffodil ensured that the deliverables were delivered within the timelines. The adoption of DevOps approach has accelerated the release cycle by 5x and has resulted in 20% cost savings in the feature update process. Developing the application using React Native turned out to be the edge that the development team required to develop the application in a strict timeline. The reusable components provided by React Native led to a saving of more than 350 hours of development time. Within a few months of its launch, the platform has received an amazing response from the users and sponsors. For all programs that air on 106.2 FM, the users can look into their schedules (with details such as timing, days, MJs, name of the show).

  • 5x faster release cycle
  • 20% cost optimization for feature releases
  • 350 hours of development efforts saved
  • 7 full stack developers deployed

 

“I appreciate the efforts put forth by the entire team at Daffodil. I must say your entire team is very cooperative and supportive, looking forward to working on more projects with your team.”

 

Anshul Jain, Project Manager,
Zee Entertainment Enterprises

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