The power of crowdsourced planning
Industry: Broadcast TV and Streaming
Media Center: press.viaplaygroup.se
Viaplay Group is one of the leading broadcasting and streaming providers in Europe. Now operating in 12 markets, Viaplay is on its way to become a global streaming challenger.
Challenge
Viaplay provides both broadcast and OTT sports channels across many markets. These channels are characterised by being local for each market, but sharing a lot of similarities in terms of content and scheduling.
Scheduling each local channel separately created inefficient workflows and repetitive tasks that resulted in a very manual and time-consuming scheduling process.
Viaplay needed a scheduling solution that could minimize duplicate work made across regions in order to scale fast and deliver rich metadata to all of their endpoints in an expanding list of countries.
Viaplay has a total of 50 Sports channels operating across 9 countries that are scheduled using the Clipsource platform.
Solution
Clipsource’s unique scheduling system helps Viaplay streamline their sports scheduling workflows and maintain a high-quality output by allowing them to:
Create as well as collect and reuse schedules from multiple scheduling systems enabling their teams in all countries to crowdsource schedule data rather than starting from scratch for each channel.
Automate the distribution of schedules and marketing metadata to external parties - streamlining how their data could be used and distributed internally and externally.
Automate and crowdsource image management.
Individual channels but ability to share data
As a channel is always local at its endpoint in terms of content, timezones and rights, Viaplay needs to schedule channels individually.
However, even though each channel is planned individually, Clipsource provides the ability to share and reuse planning data in the form of time-based data, metadata, images and rights between all of their Viaplay channels, regardless of whether they are originally planned in Clipsource or any of Viaplays other third-party planning systems (i.e. Movida or Pawa).
This function saves time for Viaplay’s planners since they do not have to create a new event from scratch for programs that are reruns or broadcasted on another channel in their own country or in another country.
Planners have the ability to build a schedule from scratch or copy events, whole days or whole weeks from other channels.
Planners also have the ability to change and block individual programs in individual channels.
How to Schedule
When producing a new schedule, planners start by creating an event (i.e. a slot date, start time and stop time).
The event can be defined as Premiere, Rerun or Live and can be blocked for selected countries in the event that broadcasting rights are not available in specific locations.
Planners can then adjust the content by creating a new program from scratch or download an already created program from Program Catalog. Program Catalog also stores other related media such as images and trailers.
Planners can add rights to the events such as Catch Up and Start Over rights.
When creating or editing programs (e.g. adding images), metadata and media are synced where they can be reused. This means that a local program can automatically get enriched with relevant images and metadata originally added by a planner in another country.
Validation rules for a full set of data
Validations are put into effect to ensure there are no crucial gaps, overlaps or missing metadata/media requirements in your metadata before distribution. Viaplay uses the same validation rules for both manual planning in Clipsource as for QA the schedules from other planning systems, before publishing and distributing.
‘Hard blocks’ are used for crucial issues such as gaps, overlaps and crucial metadata missing, such as program titles. If there is a ‘hard block’ then Viaplay will be notified and the data will not be published until the error has been amended.
‘Soft blocks’ are warning flags and cover things like missing images or translations but schedules can still be published despite these warnings.
Oh, and the reports. . .
As a secondary challenge to the scheduling, Viaplay Sports teams were struggling with very time-consuming and manual tasks for creating usage reports for various programs and rights. Programs and rights were used in different planning systems, as well as used in an ever-growing list of countries and channels
Since content and schedules for all 91 channels that Viaplay currently operate, linear as well as VOD, are available in the Clipsource platform, Clipsource created a “Do It Yourself” report tool where sports planners and other stakeholders with just a few clicks can create a one-time or recurring report for one or more programs/rights, that specifies when, where, how and how often this/these programs have been aired.
Other benefits:
In addition to all the above, Clipsource’s Scheduling platform also does the following for Viaplay:
Automatically adjusts for daylight saving time
Automatically publishes the number of weeks agreed for each channel
Has support for planned gaps, i.e unplanned slots
Result
Time-saving - The unique scheduling and enrichment workflows, that crowdsource efforts across channels and countries, means that the content creation, schedule management and media enrichment can be made with the least amount of double work.
Better information accuracy - automated and seamless metadata reduces the risk of duplications and human errors. By having a complete and validated set of marketing data and media, the customer can stay in control of how their content is presented in all platforms and channels, internally and externally.
Lower costs - the Clipsource solution has significantly reduced the number of man-hours needed to manage the distribution of metadata.
Scalability - the Clipsource platform is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), 100 percent scalable to the customers’ needs. Rolling out to new countries or adding more channels is a very streamlined process
Future-proof - as with most SaaS solutions, new technologies and standards are continuously added as they arrive. Well-structured data also makes it easier to integrate with future standards and add new distribution channels.