A Bold Website that Freshens Content for All Audiences

Rather than tiptoe into the digital age, Charlie Rose, a public television institution, decided to jump with both feet into the online marketplace of ideas and content.

He asked Code and Theory to lead a project which would bring together over 4,000 hours of video and content from a long tenure in public television. It needed to be intuitive and searchable, as well as enable staff to manage the content with ease and editorial control.

Creating the Necessary Tools

Code and Theory designed and developed the site, including the creation of innovative interfaces that surface videos in-line across the site.

To manage the huge archive of video segments, Code and Theory developed a complete custom content management solution. It allowed editors to easily update show and guest information, as well as pull together segments from the video archive in an editorialized format.

For content population, Code and Theory helped import thousands of pieces of metadata about the interviews, including keywords, descriptions, topics, and automatically generated image stills.

Additional features included unique pages for guests who have been on the show. Those pages contained videos of all past appearances and personal information such as biographical data. Site visitors were also able to comment, share, and purchase videos.

Unprecedented Results

At the time of its launch, CharlieRose.com was unprecedented in terms of its scope. It was the largest video interview archive on the Internet, with free streams of over 4,000 hours of Charlie's interviews, all easily accessible by guest, topic, date, or keyword. The project represented over a year's worth of close collaboration between Code and Theory and the Charlie Rose team.

Charlie Rose described the result as “an unparalleled innovation that takes the mission of public television one step further. We are taking the idea of accessibility, the sharing of informed, provocative ideas, to an entirely new level.”