The spread of the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the role of local TV stations in delivering what can be life-saving information to the community. To help regional media reach their audiences more effectively, startup Didja Inc. developed the LocalBTV app, which beams local TV to smartphones and tablets and make it easier for communities to watch and record them.

“[With] COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news, with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around … community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out,” said Dan Drew (pictured), vice president of engineering and chief technology officer of Didja. “Having really local things versus I’m just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don’t really care about … that’s really what we want to help improve and support.”

Drew spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the importance of local broadcasters, how Didja can help viewers get the content they are currently missing, and how the company can allow media owners to maintain a more direct relationship with their audience.

Hybrid cloud supports the system

Didja’s LocalBTV relies on a hybrid-cloud architecture anchored on Amazon Web Services to offer and manage its services. Unlike many products on the market today, which primarily serve national feeds, LocalBTV has to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each region in which it operates.

“That sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way,” Drew explained. “And we do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon.”

Many channels that broadcast local content are still over the air, and that is why they tend to get ignored and are unavailable to many users, according to Drew. In Los Angeles, for example, there are more than 100 over-the-air channels, and less than a dozen are available on big name products like Hulu or YouTube TV.

“We’re talking about 90-plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna,” Drew said. “Part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people.

In the AWS environment, LocalBTV consumes several solutions, such as the Amazon Elastic Container Service, or ECS, a highly scalable and high-performance container management service. “We’re completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them,” Drew said.

Ads can be more personalized

LocalBTV also uses technology to collect real-time metrics from all of its markets and to store them on data lakes for analysis. It also adopts solutions like Media Tailor, which allows the personalization and monetization of video content with server-side ad insertion, something that most small stations do not have access to.

“In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance and not personalized obviously for that reason,” Drew said. “Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide real-time, targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations.”

Didja can also offer other important features to broadcasting partners. For channels authorized to broadcast even outside of their market, for example, the company can easily place them in other regions and attract more viewers this way, according to Drew.

After being available in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Philadelphia and Phoenix areas, LocalBTV has recently opened in New York. The idea is to continue expanding, and a central management service enables the company to add markets to the system within hours and in an economical way.

“One of the things where Amazon has really, really helped us is to allow us to do some really complex things and in an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small, relatively speaking — that’s really what allows us to do as a business,” Drew said.

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE