Case Studies
Robert Forsyth, Director of Operations, WJLA-TV
www.wjla.com
“Our longstanding partnership with Irides has been critical to our success as one of the top TV station web sites in the country.”
Customer Profile:
ABC 7/WJLA-TV is a division of Allbritton Communications. Allbritton Communications
owns and operates eight television stations in seven broadcast markets in Alabama, Arkansas,
Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. It also owns and
operates News Channel 8, a 24-hour cable news channel which shares facilities with
ABC 7/WJLA-TV.
WJLA was the first television station in the Washington, D.C. region with a web site, the first
station in its market to put news headlines on the web, and the first to stream video of its
newscasts. It has consistently ranked in the top-10 of independent TV station web site
surveys in the U.S. The web sites for WJLA and all the Allbritton stations are hosted by Irides.
The Irides Solution:
Irides has been an integral technology partner of WJLA and the Allbritton stations for seven
years. Irides designed a managed hosting solution that allowed traffic and content to scale
and grow as more news stories and video were incorporated into the web sites. News stories,
ads, weather data, graphics, and video are now spread across a load-balanced solution that
requires more than 20 servers for eight television stations.
The SoloServer Center gives WJLA managers the ability to review real-time bandwidth and server load as well as the results of Irides’ security scans and regular penetration testing. Irides’ expertise in streaming solutions has helped keep all eight stations delivering breaking news and weather alerts to viewers consistently and reliably.
Irides manages all mail services and has implemented a perimeter spam solution, webmail
for newsroom staff and an Exchange Server for business and sales departments in the stations.
Looking Forward:
WJLA has millions of pageviews every month, if not every day on occasion, and expects
to continue to grow its web presence as more features are introduced. WJLA intends to
rely on the expertise of Irides engineers as new technologies become available and TV
stations look to podcast their newscasts, offer greater news alerts options to their viewers,
and expand the integration and presence of video on the web sites.
