Author: Alain Savoie

Customer: Rogers Sportsnet

Application: Chameleon (Super Ticker Legacy)

Platform: RossVideo XPression

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Rogers Sportsnet has been fighting it out with Bell’s TSN for top prize in the Canadian sports broadcasting landscape. After purchasing the broadcast side of The Score, they wanted to combine The Score’s legendary ticker with the less ambitious tickers Bannister Lake had created for Sportsnet for many years. With 7 channels and their unique ticker requirements, Sportsnet was looking at a single solution to drive them all in an efficient manner while not increasing the operator head count.

The 4 regional channels, Sportsnet East, Ontario, West and Pacific continue to provide a ticker with a regional flavor focusing on information for the region while showing all the national information. These tickers are displayed in a compact fashion to allow the video to dominate.

The newly imagined Sportsnet 360, taking its lead from The Score, became a channel which showed its ticker all the time including commercials and live events. This ticker had more information including betting odds on games and displayed its information in a taller format. This is the channel where hardcore sports fans tune into

Sportsnet One is the national channel while Sportsnet World focuses on world sports like cricket, soccer and rugby.

Super Ticker (now morphed into Chameleon with the inclusion of branding from Brando) became the ideal system to drive these diverse tickers. With a small team of operators organizing the rundowns for these channels, Sportsnet was able to deal with the hectic pace of sports data. While a great deal of the work is automated, Super Ticker’s web interface Flow became the platform for creating the added news that goes into the world of sports and the games and events that drive it.

Super Ticker’s content management was key to success; one database and a multi-user web interface. Super Ticker allows organizing data in a way where the channels can pick and choose their rundowns to include national and regional data.

YAHOO! Sports broadcasts a weekly Fantasy Football show reviewing all aspects of the NFL current season.

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The show is an interactive show which lets viewers call in, web conference or tweet their comments and opinions on their favorite players and teams. As an interactive show YAHOO needed a solution that could deliver player and team statistics quickly and easily with the most up to date statistics in a reliable fashion.

A customized solution was developed to meet the requirements of Yahoo. The solution incorporated the reading of 3 different data feeds to compile the most up to date statistics possible. Data feeds automatically provide the current injury reports, player and team statistics. Using a client-server workflow the custom graphic application can be run from a laptop on the network to drive the Xpression graphic system. This workflow allows a second operator to use Xpression at the same time for any additional needs such as lower thirds.

Problem: With so much data available the operator is overwhelmed trying to retrieve it fast enough to keep up with a live program.

Solution: By building a custom software application Bannister was able to present all the NFL data in an organized fashion in a single screen. From here the operator can quickly select a player or team and display any or all of the statistics available within seconds.

Problem: Viewers that call into the show are pre-screened so it is known what topics they wish to discuss just before they are on air. During this very short period of time the operator needs to prepare as many statistics as possible which could come out of the callers dialog.

Solution: The application allows the operator to start typing, “man” for example, and it automatically filters the names. Using a ‘;’ separator the operator can quickly type multiple names resulting in a much more condense list of NFL players for that call.