Inside the START Streaming Service Editorial Team: The Technical Editors
We continue our look into the START streaming service editorial team. In the second article of the series, Anya Kornienko, the managing editor of the technical editorial department, explains what her team does.
Team Structure and What We Do
The technical editorial team includes a lead editor, two junior editors, and a tagging editor, all under my supervision.
To put it simply, we oversee almost everything related to movies and TV series on the platform. When we learn that a title has been scheduled for release, we begin preparing the announcement. We collect meta information (premiere year, genres, production country, film crew, etc.), get texts, posters, and trailers from colleagues, learn about licensing terms (duration, geography, partners), create a product card in the admin panel, and upload the materials. We are responsible for how the product looks on the platform, so we review all materials and consult with colleagues if we find any issues.
Product Card Management Stages
On the agreed date, we publish the product announcement — a card without the movie or episodes, featuring a badge showing when the film or series will be available on the platform. We often publish these announcements or update them with posters, trailers, and badges in sync with our marketing team’s press releases.
We also create announcements for upcoming originals well in advance when there’s no poster or trailer yet, using a placeholder with the company’s “S” logo. These pages are created to boost SEO.
Once ready, we upload the movie or series, along with subtitles and additional audio tracks, to the product, marking the start and end of the intro and credits. And when the release date arrives, we publish the video. Premiere titles are released as soon as the rights become available, typically at midnight. However, there are exceptions, such as “The Boy’s Word”. For this product, new episodes had to be uploaded to the admin panel between 1 and 2 a.m. We then had to wait another hour for the video to decode, and make the episode available on the service by 7 a.m. Essentially, the work continued throughout the night.
So nearly every evening, from the end of the workday until 1 a.m. or later, one of the editors remains on duty to handle last-minute urgent edits to products, publish premieres and new episodes overnight, and display products. We also have a weekend editor. Plus, representatives from all editorial teams take turns working on holidays.
In an ideal world, where we have all the materials upfront, it takes half an hour to create a movie card in the admin panel, and 70 minutes for a TV series. However, after creating the card and publishing the product, we frequently revisit it to change posters, re-upload videos, update licensing terms, and make adjustments for the release of a new season.
Additional Responsibilities
We request subtitles, review them, make corrections, and upload them to the platform. We are currently adding Russian subtitles adapted for users with hearing impairments. The service also offers subtitles in English. We’ve recently begun adding audio tracks with 5.1 surround sound.
We mark out content to allow users the option to skip recaps, intros, and end credits. We’re also adding a notice through the admin panel about the presence of products from the banned company Meta (FB, Instagram, etc.) in the content. We receive that information from the video processing team.
We upload photos of creators, prioritizing originals and major new releases. We’ve already uploaded nearly 5,000 photos prepared by our designers.
The tagging editor manages hashtags — thematic collections that can be found on the product card, the main page, and in a special section. Together with our colleagues, we’ve developed an extensive system of 200 collections, after which the editor added appropriate hashtags to each product. She now continues to tag new releases.
New Admin Panel Benefits
A significant part of my job involves enhancing our primary tool, the admin panel (CMS).
We have a dedicated stream for automating processes and improving the CMS, through which we’ve fulfilled many of our goals. Since its inception, nearly 500 tasks of varying complexity have been completed in the new admin panel. Most of these tasks were put forward, designed, and planned by us, the main clients and users, including button placement, field arrangements, etc.
First, we organized the fields, removed the unnecessary elements, and added buttons for quick selecting of multiple countries and platforms. Additionally, we introduced the ability to automatically create seasons and episodes, whereas previously we had to add each episode manually. We made it possible to drag and drop trailers to rearrange their order. We also gained control over the catalog header and filters, as well as the genre system, within the admin panel, and renamed genres for consistency.
Then, our colleagues made us a nifty chatbot that notifies us if video encoding fails, allowing us to promptly address any issues. And my favorite feature is the statistics, which let us generate reports from the admin fields independently, taking the load off analysts for these tasks.
Collaboration with Other Departments and Shared Tasks
We have cross-team interactions when working on joint projects and tasks. For instance, through collaboration between our designer, technical editorial team, developers, and product team, we automated badges that were previously manually embedded into posters.
Product and development have enabled 4K video quality to be stored alongside Full HD, eliminating the need to duplicate products for the 4K track.
We also work closely with our product team on new features, the implementation of which requires changes in admin panel. That, and we share hypotheses.
We keep in constant touch with our editorial colleagues — designers, editors, and copywriters — who regularly give us content to upload to the admin panel. As the final link in the publication chain, we rely heavily on getting materials on time. We also frequently interact with storefront editors, who give us tasks to update the main page during our shifts. We communicate closely with the programming department regarding the release schedule.
We continue to refine the admin panel and work with the development team to fix urgent service problems. We discuss promotional items and creator photos with our marketing and PR colleagues, and make plans for announcements together. We collaborate with the affiliate and licensing teams on rights-related matters.
Our job involves many details and rules we need to follow to make sure content is delivered correctly to users and partner platforms. So, we document all our processes in the guidelines, which also include contributions from our editorial colleagues. Having this knowledge base makes the editors’ job easier, including managing changes, and it also helps new employees integrate into the team more safely and comfortably.
Plans for the Future
This summer, we plan to review all our internal processes, find areas where we can make improvements, and shift task communication to the tracker. I’ve already noted down new problems with the admin panel and will assemble a team to brainstorm solutions and make a new list of tasks for development. I’m pushing for more automation and streamlining in various areas like managing images, systems for storing and uploading materials, on-duty procedures, and interactions between departments regarding releases and other matters.
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