Nzoom's replacement site tailor-made for television

By ADAM GIFFORD

Television New Zealand's new website should be up by the end of the week, spelling the end of its nzoom portal.

TVNZ Interactive general manager Alistair Matthewson said the site was due to go live on Sunday evening to coincide with TVNZ's new branding, but was delayed because of caching problems.

"We are in the final stages of testing and migrating content," Matthewson said.

Nzoom used Vignette content management software to serve its pages.

The new site uses the open-source Cocoon application server and Apache web server, sitting on an Oracle 9i database on clustered servers running Red Hat Linux.

"With our reduction in head count last year, we needed a platform where we could react to changes quickly," Matthewson said.

"With Vignette we had to have skills in-house. By moving to open-source we can partner with other suppliers."

Datacom is involved in the site redevelopment.

Matthewson said the aim of the new site was to complement and extend the viewer experience.

It will be driven more by events and shows covered by TVNZ, such as rugby tournaments and New Zealand Idol, so the site must be able to cope with large spikes in traffic.

According to web monitoring company Red Sheriff, Nzoom ranks fifth among New Zealand websites, with about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The site delivers approximately 10 million page impressions a month, spiking to 15 million page impressions during the Rugby World Cup in October.

"Tvnz.co.nz will be one of the most promoted URLs [web addresses] through the power of TVNZ. Viewers are already starting to see it in promotion breaks," Matthewson said.

The new site will include news and sport, but there will be no return of lifestyle and feature content which was dropped when the site was downsized last October.

The TVNZ Interactive division has about 40 staff.