The Golden Globes (HFPA)
<1,4 sec
page load time
4M
total page views in less than a 48-hour period
100%
uptime
2.2M
total file requests in 2016
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is a non-profit organization of international media journalists based in Southern California. The HFPA membership disseminates information about movies and television through their various publications throughout the world. Most famously, the group also hosts the annual Golden Globe Awards to recognize the world’s best in television and film.
In order to create a premium web experience built on a platform that ensures optimum uptime during high traffic events, the HFPA reached out to Metal Toad for help.
Custom International CMS Build
The HFPA wanted to transform its web platform into a hub of year-round entertainment news. This requires managing video, image, and text content in the ever-changing world of international film and television in a web application that is elegant, highly functional, and easy to use. Due to Metal Toad’s expertise in creating custom software in the entertainment space, the HFPA charged our team with the creation of a custom content management system (CMS) to accomplish all of its online content needs.
Discovery required flexibility and ongoing consultation as all stakeholders had a hard deadline — Nominations Night 2015. The new web application had to be fully functional in the days approaching Nominations Night and the cloud architecture had to be ready to scale.
The solution is an editorial web application, complete with graphical timelines, historical snapshots, social media integration, and rich media content. The scalable, flexible, open-source CMS transformed the HFPA’s web presence from a simple informational site that experienced an uptick in traffic only two nights a year to a destination resource for content about the international film and television community.
Custom Cloud & Autoscaling
The HFPA’s irregular, event-specific traffic required Metal Toad to build cloud infrastructure capable of incredible elasticity. Exponential fluctuations on both Nominations Night and Awards Night require a cloud platform that can scale on demand with both manual and automatic controls.
Leveraging the flexibility of the cloud autoscaling tools, GoldenGlobes.com successfully delivered over four million page requests in the 48-hour window around Nominations Night 2015. Page load time was under a quarter of a second and all HFPA web properties had 100 percent uptime.
As the final piece of providing the HFPA with white glove service, Metal Toad now sends a crew to be on site for the Awards Night ceremony to further mitigate risk. Manual tweaks to cloud infrastructure happen on demand and there are senior cloud engineers and software architects on site if any HFPA staff or vendors require immediate consultation.
Ongoing Consulting & Application Support
The HFPA still works closely with Metal Toad on its entire digital infrastructure. Metal Toad has also built relationships with social media, web design, SEO, and event vendors so that the HFPA can count on holistic communication and group-based decision making.
Next steps for translating the Golden Globes brand into a premium web and mobile presence will focus on a “second-screen experience” that will highlight unique video and image content from backstage on Awards Night. Expanding the brand into a native mobile app driven by unique content will be specific to the Golden Globes and — along with other iterative desktop improvements — the web ecosystem will truly be unrivaled in the industry.
Metal Toad is proud to be the long-term technological partner for an elite organization that entertains the globe.
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