PBS Newshour Leverages HTML + Twitter to Provide Realtime TSA Holiday Delay Alerts

The PBS NewsHour app, created using AppMakr, announced yesterday an initiative to allow its mobile users to “Track #TSATime at Your Airport From Your Phone“.

The coolest thing about this realtime TSA holiday delay alerting system is how quickly and easily PBS was able to implement it, using a combination of AppMakr, HTML5 and Twitter.

In this blog post we’ll take you behind the scenes to explain exactly what PBS did, and tell you how they did it.

What PBS did: PBS co-opted its normal sponsorship “ad unit” slot, which was held by Intel when the NewsHour app launched, and for the holidays changed it to read “TSAtime: LIVE Airport Security Updates from PBS NewsHour Readers.” This allows PBS to highlight the TSA holiday delay tracker feature, which is run using a Twitter hash-tag, #TSATime built into a custom micro website using HTML.  The effect of this holiday ad-unit swap-out is that users of the PBS NewsHour app can easily select an airport and see how bad the delays at at that airport are, and also contribute their experiences quickly & easily using Twitter.  Or to put it another way, it reduces the uncertainty around how long you’ll have to spend at the airport dealing with delays, and gives you an “inside scoop” into wait times at various airports that most travelers don’t have.

How PBS did it: The first step was a simple server-side ad-unit change by PBS.  The ad-unit slot had already been specified on the “Monetize” tab of the AppMakr page upon app creation.  When PBS NewsHour made the app, on the “Monetize” tab in AppMakr they selected the “custom ad unit” option, and then created a 320 pixel x 55 pixel sponsorship banner, which ran on every screen of the app.  But for the holidays, they swapped out the sponsorship banner (it was Intel when the app was launched – see screenshot at left) with a message that read “TSATime: LIVE Airport Security Updates from PBS NewsHour Readers” (see screenshot at right).  Clicking on this new banner would slide open a mobile website within the iPhone app that allowed users to select an airport and see delays in that airport.  This was all done using HTML, with the data being provided by Twitter.  See the images below for details on what the app looked like when the new banner was clicked.

What it means: This creative use of the AppMakr ad-unit slot provided app users with a valuable and time-saving tool that gave them a leg-up during the busy holiday travel season.  The most amazing part from our perspective is that since AppMakr is 100% self-service, PBS was able to implement this using the AppMakr platform without needing to speak to anyone at AppMakr.  In fact, we only found about it because we are NewsHour app users ourselves, and PBS used AppMakr’s Push Notification service to send a notice out to everyone who’d downloaded the app about this feature.  Then, Travis Daub with PBS dropped us a note and said , “Hey AppMakr guys, just wanted to brag about this cool feature we added to our app for the holidays.  Love the fact we have the ability to do this!”

Yes Travis, brag indeed – it’s a very progressive and insanely useful piece of functionality you just built into your app!  We’ll be using this ourselves to navigate our travels this holiday season, so thanks again.