The Norwegian broadcaster TV 2 were looking for a tool that could help them scale up the number of live events while reducing the manual work required to deliver their current sports productions.
By incorporating Vimond VIA Live (Vimond’s channel planning and monitoring solution) , TV 2 was able to greatly improve their day- to-day operations. The result is a massive improvement of their scheduling & distribution workflow, enabling them to continue scaling their sports offering for all Norwegian viewers.
Problem
TV 2 Norway has throughout the years offered one of the most premium sports streaming services in Norway. The English Premier League, Summer and Winter Olympics, UEFA Champions League, FIFA World Cup, Tour de France, UEFA European Championship – the list goes on.
However, this broad content library offered a challenge when broadcasting live events digitally: It created a lot of manual work for their online editorial sports teams. These are some of them:
* Creating event assets in their digital OTT CMS
* Populating them with the correct metadata and images
* Managing the broadcast times and schedules
* Linking the digital assets with the correct feeds and encoders
* Managing publication rights and the live- to-VOD workflows
* Monitoring the live event’s performance and stability.
Each of these tasks was required whenever they wanted to broadcast a live event (and multiplied by the number of events).
TV 2 can often average anywhere between 50-100 individual live sporting events throughout a normal weekend, meaning a busy day would require multiple people’s efforts to successfully broadcast all events.
This created several problems for TV 2. Most important of all, it tied up valuable personnel hours and cost, but it also increased the chances for human error during the broadcasts.
Solution
After adopting Vimond’s VIA Live module, TV 2 has since been able to automate a large majority of manual tasks that were required to deliver a live event.
While managing metadata for both linear and OTT distribution in PROVYS during the planning phase, VIA Live will automatically pick up this information and ingest the asset placeholders with the relevant broadcast times to the main OTT platform system, Vimond VIA.
Once the event goes live, VIA Live will ensure that the stream is available to the public at the start of the broadcast.
VIA Live will also make sure that the correct publication rights and live-to-VOD workflows are met and followed, removing the need for any manual post-event work.
Having automatically populated the OTT CMS with assets from PROVYS, VIA Live also provides TV 2’s online editors with a dedicated user interface for live event management.
Through this interface, editors can make instant changes and adjustments to the digital assets and schedules on the fly, enabling them to work freely without being dependent on other systems and/or departments.
Result
By TV 2 adapting VIA Live, enabling them to move much of the manual work upstream, the online sports operators now enjoy an automated live event workflow. With a greatly improved workflow and a much more streamlined process, TV 2’s online teams can now focus their precious efforts on something else than repetitive manual labor during live operations.
Almost all the manual work with single play-out is done during the planning and as such we have way less work during the actual production. Today, three people dealt with 18 online productions + one linear. A year ago, this would have demanded a lot of hands. And best of all, no issues at all
- Alexander Breidvik, Coordinator of Sports, TV 2 Play
