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Broadcasting channels and live events on digital platforms can be challenging for content owners. And no, I’m not talking about stability and the robustness of the streams – that’s a discussion for another day. What I’m going to talk about is this: How you, as a broadcaster or live content provider, can optimise and automate to drastically improve your digital operational workflows to achieve the permanent corporate goal of reducing manual work.
We have seen the challenges firsthand. One of our team members worked on the Online Sports editorial team at TV 2 Norway and experienced the challenges of the live broadcast world daily. The team is responsible for digitally broadcasting premium sports rights to the Norwegian audience through TV 2’s streaming service.
The English Premier League, both the Summer and Winter Olympics, the Tour de France – the list goes on. TV 2 has a long history of broadcasting sports online, and they were averaging, and still are, an impressive number of sports events per week throughout the year.
Manual work is included when managing live channels
However, we still did plenty of manual work.
Creating assets in our digital OTT system
- Populating them with metadata and images
- Manage times for broadcast schedules
- Linking the assets with the correct feeds and scheduled encoders
- Managing spreadsheets and publication rights
- And a lot more
All to send events online. And all this, done manually! How could this be? How could a leading Nordic broadcaster depend so heavily on this amount of manual work?
Luckily, this has all changed, and every manual task I just mentioned has now been completely automated. For those of you who manage large-scale installations with many channels, live events, sports events and so forth – and for those who recognise these challenges.
Removing manual work for broadcast
Let's explore how you can get rid of a lot of this manual work yourself. So, what is the secret? Let’s break down these common challenges a bit more to examine what could be done in each area.
If we start with the first, and probably the most significant task that many people have: Creating new digital assets for the online distribution of live events. Many broadcasters experience that for every channel or live event they are to broadcast on their streaming service, they have to create a new asset in their OTT system.
Why is that, you might ask? The answer? The age-old problem in the broadcasting industry is that traditional linear systems and live streaming systems don't communicate effectively enough for people to trust the output.
This leaves you with an independent set of digital assets, which means you now have to populate them with metadata, match them to broadcast schedules, and match them to the correct feeds and live encoders.
As many broadcasters easily average 50-100 live events and shows per typical weekend, this creates high volumes of manual work. Then, when an event is finished, many need to manually manage publication rights and license windows for live events to ensure the correct live-to-VOD and catch-up criteria are met under your contracts.
What are you left with? A lot of people – managing a ton of work, all done manually.
So what did TV 2 do? How did they escape this dreaded cycle of manual work that created more manual work? We have already mentioned the core issue: the set of assets was separated from the rest, so we had to redo many tasks that were already managed by other departments.
The solution, therefore, was to connect the set of assets to the other systems in the value chain and utilise these systems to extract the metadata needed to automatically populate our digital assets.
They also needed a tool that would let us make instant changes to metadata across the set of digital assets without interfering with anyone else’s workflows. This way, they kept control of the assets by not making us dependent on other systems and departments.
So the question now is: what tool changed the game for me at the time and has solved this problem for many others with the exact needs?
Vimond VIA with the Live Channel Planner features. Using this product, they can utilise the broadcast EPG schedules to automatically populate the CMS and OTT systems with digital assets that reflect the broadcast schedules. It will populate all these assets with the correct metadata and broadcast times, making them instantly ready for online broadcast. The product will also ensure that the correct publication rights (live-to-VOD/catch-up) are met and adhered to, eliminating manual post-event work.
Since the product integrates with broadcast tools, a broadcaster can maintain the same assetID throughout the entire workflow, allowing us to maintain complete control over what and where the assets are.
Efficient live channel planning
A completely automated process, where the content coming from linear broadcasts is created, packaged and prepared for online broadcasts – allowing online teams to focus their precious efforts on something other than repetitive manual labour that should be completely unnecessary.
Feel free to reach out to inquire about our video platform.