N+ Mexico news unit restreams live election coverage in vertical format using Grabyo
N+ distributes news and entertainment content across TV, online, apps, radio and more. Based in Mexico, its news broadcasting arm provides national and regional coverage across the country.
The Opportunity
In June 2024, Mexico’s General Election took place. This election was set to grip the country for a number of reasons, as over 98 million eligible voters were set to choose between 70,000 candidates for 20,000 public offices.
With the incumbent President unable to re-run, there was to be a new leader of Mexico. The country was also about to elect its first female president, with women as the two front runners. Many issues and topics were to be debated heading into one of Mexico’s most important elections in years.
Televisa and its news unit N+ recognized the importance of this election cycle and decided to scale its news coverage output and deliver more live updates to the people of Mexico.
One of N+ aims was to reach more people across social media with live election coverage. Mexico is home to over 90 million social media users, which equals around 70% of the population.
Live streams on social media are highly effective in reaching and informing voters, especially younger demographics.
However, producing and delivering live streams to multiple social channels can be costly and complex. Either building more capacity in news broadcasting studios, or creating new studios for streaming requires high investment in both capital and resource.
The Solution
N+ turned to the cloud, in particular, Grabyo, to extend its live coverage with alternate broadcasting and restreaming. N+ live production and live clipping services were set up and ready to use within four days.
Our live production platform, Grabyo Producer, is a virtual, cloud-based production control room (PCR) which is accessed via a web browser, and is accessible anywhere.
To extend its TV coverage to social media, N+ sent its clean broadcast output feeds to Grabyo for reformatting and redistribution.
Once the live feeds reached Grabyo Producer, the N+ team were able to optimize the feeds, overlay new graphics, replace ads and insert VOD assets before distributing it directly to social media.
The team replaced specific broadcast ads (that were not permitted on social media) with pre-loaded VOD assets such as new content or Televisa promos. Grabyo’s SCTE-35 ad detection and replacement feature enabled N+ to semi-automate this process, once replacement assets were identified.
Throughout the election, N+ also used a dedicated vertical control room in Grabyo to deliver live news directly to Instagram and to TikTok via custom RTMP delivery. In the control room, the team was able to crop and dynamically reposition a 16:9 live feed to optimize it for 9:16 delivery.
N+ also took advantage of Grabyo’s partnership integration with Flowics, the HTML graphics platform. The team purpose-built graphics for both 9:16 and 16:9 productions within Flowics, then brought them into Grabyo for each live stream. This included user-generated content (UGC) such as social posts from its audience and political commentators.
N+ social team collaborated within Grabyo to deliver each live stream, in a small team of five people managing each production. The team was able to be reactive to breaking news throughout the election cycle, setting up social media streams to redistribute news as it was reported.
Three members of its team also created real-time, breaking news clips using our live clipping and publishing platform. With rapid clipping and editing tools, plus direct publishing integrations with all major social media platforms, N+ served the Mexican people with news updates as it happened.
The Results
N+ extended its live coverage across all of its social media channels – YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, supplemented by clips and video updates every day.
@nmasmedia Claudia Sheinbaum, Xóchitl Gálvez o Jorge Álvarez Máynez. Cada vez estamos más cerca de conocer los resultados oficiales que mostrarían una tendencia a favor y saber quién gobernará México para los próximos seis años. ¿Qué propuestas hicieron para erradicar la desigualdad? Esto fue lo que las candidatas y el candidato respondieron, en campaña, a los jóvenes que les expresaron esta preocupación en el photo booth de N+ Media. #eleccionesmx2024 #politica #Mexico #desigualdad #elecciones #politica #desigualdad #eleccionesmx2024 ♬ sonido original – nmásmedia
@nmasmedia ¿Cómo encontrar mi casilla? Si no sabes dónde votar este domingo 2 de junio, aquí te decimos. #elecciones #méxico #politica #2dejunio #casilla #casillaespecial ♬ sonido original – nmásmedia
By placing Grabyo at the center of its social content production, N+ was able to maximize its resources, without heavy further investment, to scale its social content output and keep up with the rapid news cycle of the election.
“We knew going into the 2024 election, we would need to serve our audiences with up to the minute coverage on all of our platforms. Social media has become one of the biggest arenas for political discussion so we knew we needed to scale our presence there. Using Grabyo made this possible – both from a live streaming and real-time video approach. For our digital team, we wouldn’t have been able to take our live TV coverage and format it correctly to engage audiences on social media without the tools offered by Grabyo. They made it very easy and quick to get started, and the platform is intuitive so our team mastered it quickly.”
