We are proud to announce the beta release of Mediafly Airship, our powerful web-based content management system that lets your content administrators easily manage the media within your beautiful Mediafly iPad, iPhone, Android, Roku, and web apps.
Since 2008, Mediafly has been building its Publisher content management system. This system was built around very specific concepts that are common in the world of podcasting: shows, episodes, and subscriptions. For six years we maintained Publisher, even as we refocused our core business into enterprise content distribution. In late 2011, however, the time had come to say goodbye. We moved forward on a massive undertaking: designing and building a content management system that lets business users quickly publish media to the Mediafly Platform.  After 9 months of iterative design, development, and deployment, Airship is ready to take flight.
We are introducing Airship under the guidance of a several core principles:
- Simplicity is key. Too often enterprise software crams as many features in as possible, and as a result the ability to understand systems and interfaces suffers. With Airship we are pushing to keep the system simple. Every new feature and customer request that is addressed will be built with an eye towards designing for the simplest of users.
- Speed speed speed. Everything about Airship is built with an eye for speed: uploading, transcoding, page load times, the number of clicks to execute common actions. Even our development velocity has accelerated with Airship, as we have incorporated the best practices from Agile software principles.
- Customers know. Great new features can be dreamt up, analyzed, and built, all without customer input. But will anyone use it? Â Airship was driven by lots of feedback from both paying and prospect customers.
Airship is simple to use. Users can drag and drop video, audio, images, and documents right into the web-based interface. Transcoding, encryption and security happen automatically. Setting metadata is easy. Reordering, moving, and bulk editing items is intuitive.
Many of Mediafly’s customers communicate with us through Enterprise integration, in which servers talk to servers. Historically, our customers had to make a choice: integrate with our backend or use the web-based UI?  With Airship, we can support both. Our customers’ IT can manage the bulk of operation through their workflow, and Airship can help their business users fill in the gaps. This hybrid approach will provide fantastic flexibility and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership for our customers as they can discontinue one-off tools and  specialized workflows for managing media.
Stay tuned. Over the coming months, we will pull back the covers on Airship in much greater detail and show you how it was built, what decisions were made and why, and how you can use Airship in your organization.
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