BLUE SKY THINKING Sky saved time, resources and money by utilising Pixel Power’s automation software
today as broadcasters work hard to earn advertising and subscriber revenues – and the challenge is not purely focused on the graphics or branding capabilities of a channel playout system. Other playout services that aren’t often considered can now be seen with the importance they deserve, such as metadata, access services and secondary event types in the playlist. Some secondary events are about meeting mandatory requirements, such as subtitling and audio description, but others – like local ad insertion triggers – are commercially beneficial. This means play-on providers can insert content appropriately to make channels more directly relevant to viewers. The ecosystem for secondary events feeds into legal requirements, and plays to the way media
zero (human) effort to create and schedule, but add huge value to the branding. The extension of this is the ability to produce complex trailers and promos automatically. Typically, your promo editor will create a package for, say, a new series, but instead of being faced with days of work to create all the variants, the intelligent automation takes the creative idea and blends it with data from the planning and scheduling database. It produces all the different versions automatically, adding them to the asset management register and scheduling them according to your business rules with no need for manual intervention. In fact, the intelligence built in can decide to update the promo if a schedule – such as lower thirds towards the end of one programme to trail the next, or squeeze backs to keep the audience away from the remote control – can be planned, populated and initiated automatically. This is the commercially positive double whammy. Monetisation is boosted by keeping the audiences tuned to your channels, while costs are reduced through the use of market- sensitive automation. And it’s not a vision for the future – it’s already in use with some of the largest broadcasters, from ITV and Sky in the UK to MBC and OSN in the Middle East. From the broadcaster ’s business viewpoint, marketing and branding are best placed at the point of delivery – playout. Pixel Power offers a modern, virtualised master control playout architecture that has both high-quality graphics and branding, and intelligent automation embedded deep inside. Perhaps it’s now time to elevate your brand across all your channels and make them come alive! change has been made after the original promotion was created, and it will slot in the updated version while archiving the old. Similarly, secondary events
is consumed, opening up more opportunities for providers to monetise content. POWERFUL PLAYOUT Pixel Power started out as a graphics company, and it is still regarded as a world leader in broadcast graphics. For more than a decade, the company
BRANDING IS BEST PLACED AT THE POINT OF DELIVERY
has used its software-defined architectures and graphics and branding expertise to develop playout and asset management systems. Pixel Power is now uniquely able to automate the process of creating, maintaining, populating and inserting branding graphics – as well as building all of this into a master control playout system. This means its playout automation can look at a schedule and spot an obvious gap. Where another system might just flash a red light in front of an operator for a manual fix, Pixel Power can create something to fit into that gap. It might be a rundown graphic, for example, created on the fly (using Pixel Power ’s excellent graphics engine), combining data from the schedule and asset management to populate a template in the channel’s branding style. Once the template is created, graphics like this take
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