Bannister Lake Powers Financial Broadcast Graphics for Live Video Network Cheddar

CAMBRIDGE, ON, Canada, October 5, 2016 – Bannister Lake, a leading provider of broadcast data aggregation and graphics solutions, today announced that the company’s software is powering financial graphics generation for live news and entertainment company Cheddar.

Cheddar is a live and on-demand video news network focused on covering the most innovative products, technologies, and services transforming people’s lives. The network covers this news through the lens of the companies and executives driving these changes. Cheddar broadcasts from Post 10 on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the Sprint Flatiron Building Store, and NASDAQ Marketsite. Aligning with the viewing preferences of millennial audiences, Cheddar is available through social media platforms, over-the-top (OTT) services, mobile apps, and online on its website, cheddar.com. Complementing its flagship Facebook Live streams, Cheddar announced a partnership earlier this month to bring exclusive, live ‘Closing Bell’ coverage to Twitter.

Seeking to expand and enrich its live, on-air graphics capabilities, Cheddar selected software from Bannister Lake to drive financial data management and graphics creation in conjunction with a Ross Xpression broadcast system. Seamlessly bridging Xpression with the Xignite Market Data Cloud, Cheddar’s chosen financial data provider, the Bannister Lake software gives Cheddar’s operators an easy-to-use interface to create and display up-to-the-second stock charts within their live broadcasts. Bannister Lake also generates Cheddar’s on-screen, real-time, crawling stock ticker from Xignite data, while an array of additional features allows Cheddar to trigger lower-third graphics, sequence elements into playlists, and define distinct layouts for the network’s various shows.

“The Bannister Lake software makes it easy for us to call up stock quotes and quickly create live charts for our broadcasts,” said Peter Gorenstein, chief content officer at Cheddar. “That ease and speed are critical, since financial data is time-sensitive. So many graphics solutions are inflexible, expensive, and confusing or complicated to work with. The combination of Bannister Lake software with Ross Xpression has given us the ease of use, reliability and flexibility we need as we expand our brand, programming and reach.”

Gorenstein’s satisfaction with Bannister Lake goes deeper than the software itself. “In a broadcast production environment, there is always a lot of integration required between many varying systems and components, and Bannister Lake has been tremendous in helping with that as our infrastructure evolved,” he added. “They have been responsive, met all of our deadlines, and have been a great partner all around.”

“Cheddar is a great example of the evolution of broadcasting, as new media companies emerge with a focus on the latest distribution platforms to fit the shifting viewing habits of their target audiences,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “Our solutions enable efficient, data-driven graphics workflows for any size of media enterprise on any platform, from online broadcasting start-ups to the largest traditional networks. We’re excited to be chosen by Cheddar and to be playing an important role in the growth and success of their innovative content offerings.”

Bannister Lake Integrates NewTek NDI Technology for Live IP Production Workflows

CAMBRIDGE, ON, Canada, August 24, 2016 – Bannister Lake, a leading provider of broadcast data aggregation and graphics solutions, today announced its adoption of NewTek’s Network Device Interface (NDI™) technology for live IP production workflows over Ethernet networks. With the integration of NDI, Bannister Lake’s widely-deployed software offerings will be recognizable as video sources by other NDI-enabled devices and applications on the same network.

Bannister Lake’s initial use of NDI technology will be in the Super Ticker Chameleon data presentation, management and playout system for broadcast and information displays. Announced earlier this month, Super Ticker Chameleon extends Bannister Lake’s proven data aggregation platform with new graphics creation tools and hybrid playout capabilities, forming a tightly-integrated graphics and data engine for distribution targets ranging from television news channels to digital signage and websites. Chameleon’s NDI support enables real-time graphic and alpha channel playout to other NDI-enabled production solutions over an IP network.

Bannister_Lake_Super_Ticker_Chameleon_Output_Example_NDI

“The broadcast and media production industries’ embrace of live, IP-based workflows continues to accelerate, both in IP-only deployment models and hybrid operations with baseband SDI,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “Our integration of NewTek’s NDI in Super Ticker Chameleon exemplifies our commitment to this transition. We have been impressed with both the NDI SDK itself and NewTek’s approach to making it an open technology, and we’re pleased to be working with them to deliver the benefits of IP production workflows to our customers.”

NewTek’s NDI technology enables multiple video systems and applications to identify and communicate bi-directionally with one another over IP, and to encode, transmit and receive many streams of high quality, low latency, frame-accurate video and audio in real time. This benefits any network-connected video device, including video mixers, graphics systems, capture cards, cameras and many other production devices and applications. Bannister Lake solutions will be part of the NewTek Developer Network, the industry’s largest ecosystem of IP-enabled products.

“IP workflows are revolutionizing video production, with the momentum driven by a combination of enabling technologies, customer demand and vendor support,” said Michael Kornet, executive vice president of Business Development for NewTek. “The adoption of NDI by innovators such as Bannister Lake for their best-of-breed solutions is helping to make it the most widely deployed IP production workflow on the market today, and we’re excited to welcome Bannister Lake to NewTek’s NDI ecosystem.”

NDI is now available from NewTek’s royalty free software developer kit (SDK) for any company looking to establish IP workflows within their organization, or in production tools and systems they manufacture.

Super Ticker Chameleon with NDI integration will be highlighted at the upcoming IBC2016 Conference and Exhibition, taking place September 9-13 in Amsterdam. Bannister Lake will exhibit at IBC2016 with partners including BroadStream Solutions (stand #8.B35) and Imagine Communications (stand #4.A01).

Bannister Lake Software Launches Super Ticker Chameleon for Integrated Data Presentation, Management and Playout

CAMBRIDGE, ON, Canada, August 11, 2016Bannister Lake Software is proud to introduce Super Ticker Chameleon, the most significant expansion to date of the company’s widely-deployed Super Ticker family of data aggregation and display solutions. Building on Super Ticker’s hallmark efficiency, scalability and flexibility, Chameleon extends the core Super Ticker application into a comprehensive data presentation, management and playout system for use either on its own or in conjunction with any third-party broadcast CG system.

The preferred choice of numerous top-tier media companies for creating data-rich broadcasts and displays, Super Ticker continues to enable users to easily aggregate and manage automated data feeds from premium third-party providers, and combine them with community-submitted information and locally-created content.  Chameleon augments this proven data aggregation power with new graphics creation tools and hybrid playout capabilities, forming a tightly-integrated graphics and data engine for distribution targets ranging from television news channels to digital signage and websites.

While Super Ticker’s content management and control capabilities are closely integrated with select partner solutions such as Ross Video Xpression Tick-It, historically most third-party info display and broadcast CG systems have interfaced with Super Ticker by accessing data through its BLADE (Bannister Lake Active Data Exchange) API. Chameleon’s platform-agnostic approach brings the deeper features and advantages of Super Ticker to a wider array of CG solutions, while its integrated graphics editing and playout capabilities make Super Ticker accessible to a broader customer base without third-party tools.

“Chameleon is designed to work seamlessly with any broadcast CG platform, bringing integrated Super Ticker features such as scheduling and rundowns to many third-party CG systems for the first time,” said Randy MacCarthy, lead software engineer at Bannister Lake. “At the other end of the spectrum, some media enterprises such as smaller TV and Internet broadcasters can benefit from Super Ticker’s rich data aggregation abilities, but don’t need the advanced functionality of a traditional, dedicated broadcast CG.  Chameleon offers these customers a complete data and graphics solution in an efficient, fully-integrated package, while scaling easily to meet the needs of larger broadcasters and station groups.”

Chameleon’s new graphics editor lets users design visually compelling scene layouts and link them directly to Super Ticker’s advanced data management tools. An unlimited number of zones within each scene can be independently defined for presentation of data types including sports scores, stock quotes, weather, news bulletins, election results, social media posts and more. Rundowns enable precise control of the content played out in each zone, while integrated scheduling enables channels to be fully automated across multiple layouts.

Chameleon’s new hybrid player module complements Super Ticker’s existing native and BLADE-based, third-party CG integrations, enabling baseband SDI, IP and web-based outputs. Support for NewTek’s Network Device Interface (NDI™) IP technology for live production workflows enables real-time graphic and alpha channel playout from Chameleon to other NDI-enabled systems over an IP network, while WebGL support allows rendering of the player’s output directly within HTML5 web pages.

Chameleon is slated for release in Q4 of this year, and will be offered as an add-on option for existing Super Ticker users or bundled with Super Ticker for new customers. A live, working demo of Chameleon output is currently available on the Bannister Lake website.

Super Ticker Chameleon, Super Ticker and other Bannister Lake Software solutions will be highlighted at the upcoming IBC2016 Conference and Exhibition, taking place September 9-13 in Amsterdam. Bannister Lake will exhibit at IBC2016 with partners including BroadStream Solutions (stand #8.B35) and Imagine Communications (stand #4.A01). Ross Video Tick-It and Brand-It, powered by Bannister Lake technology, will be showcased at the Ross Video booth (stand #11.C10).

chameleon

Bannister Lake delivers on-air graphics for Comedy Central’s Jeff Ross presents ‘Roast Battle’

Bannister Lake provided design and operation services for Comedy Central‘s Jeff Ross presents ‘Roast Battle’ that took place in Montreal during the Just for Laughs Festival running July 27th to 31st. The four 1 hour specials featured celebrity guests, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogen, Jimmy Kimmel, Kevin Hart and many others.

The show required a full complement of on-air graphics including a competition bracket with real-time on-the-fly updating using Ross Video Xpression.
JFL-roast-graphic 

Bannister Lake Software Introduces Super Ticker Community for Public Submission of Broadcast Data

Bannister Lake Software today announced Super Ticker Community, a public-use variant of the company’s highly-regarded Super Ticker data aggregation solution for broadcasting and information display. Complementing Super Ticker’s proven ease and efficiency in managing automated data feeds from premium third-party sources, the cloud-based Super Ticker Community provides a publicly-accessible portal for the submission of information such as school closings, special events, local sports scores, public interest announcements and more.

Bannister Lake’s Super Ticker software is used by a multitude of top-tier broadcasters and media
companies to aggregate, manage and moderate data feeds from such eminent providers as The
Associated Press (AP), Stats Inc., the U.S. National Weather Service, Twitter, Agence France-Presse
(AFP) and many more. Adding Super Ticker Community gives existing Super Ticker customers a
rich new source of data from a potentially vast array of public contributors.

“Super Ticker customers have long enjoyed its many advantages in aggregating and combining
automated, external feeds with their own original content,” said Georg Hentsch, president,
Bannister Lake. “As essential as these paid and free third-party sources are, locally-oriented data further tightens connection between broadcasters and their community. By enabling authorized users from the general public to directly provide data through an easy-to- use Internet front end, Super Ticker Community provides a rich source of local content while freeing broadcasters from the costly effort of manually inputting this information themselves.”

Like the flagship Super Ticker, Super Ticker Community offers an array of powerful features including an intuitive, web-based interface; Content Groups to partition and restrict content access; the BLADE RESTful web API for custom integration; and dynamic fields for complete flexibility in supporting any type of data.

A shared, multi-tenant Super Ticker Community cloud instance is available for free use by current Super Ticker customers with active maintenance agreements, and allows publicly-submitted data to be accessed via the BLADE interface. Dedicated Super Ticker Community instances can be purchased on a monthly or yearly subscription basis, providing complete user administration and Content Group management functionality while enabling Community data to be synchronized directly to existing Super Ticker deployments. 

Extending its value beyond the Super Ticker user base, new customers can also purchase dedicated
Super Ticker Community subscriptions for standalone use, retrieving data through the BLADE interface as a public information aggregation portal for websites, character generators and digital signage. 

Super Ticker Community, Super Ticker and other Bannister Lake Software solutions will be highlighted at the upcoming IBC2016 Conference and Exhibition, taking place September 9-13 in Amsterdam. Bannister Lake will exhibit at IBC2016 with partners including BroadStream Solutions (stand #8.B35) and Imagine Communications (stand #4.A01).

Bannister Lake Elevates Super Ticker Service to Data Aggregator

Bannister_Lake_Super_Ticker_Cloud_Screencap_Elections_789_595_70_sReposted from Broadcast BridgeBy elevating their Super Ticker service to the Cloud, Bannister Lake is making data aggregation available anywhere in the world. 

On June 30th, Bannister Lake brought out Super Ticker Cloud, a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As Georg Hentsch, president of Bannister Lake told The Broadcast Bridge, “Super Ticker Cloud includes all of the powerful features of our widely deployed on-site Super Ticker content management installations,” he said. “It is actually more of a ‘data aggregator’ capable of bringing in information from Internet data sites like AP, Election Data Services, Agence France-Presse (AFP), The Weather Company (formerly WSI). and RSS feeds just to mention a few. It’s basically our database with a Web interface.”

To reap this harvest of information, Bannister Lake has software “parsers” that read the major data feeds. “Not only do we read the data, but we have methods of organizing that information to make it useable for different purposes,” Hentsch said. “Instead of being faced with that big crazy world of random data, we give our customers structured information.”

Since the Super Ticker Cloud has public facing support, customers can enter their own data.

“We call it ‘Super Ticker Community’,” Hentsch explained. “Customers like High Schools can send out notifications of something like school closings and then other subscribers, such as local broadcasters, can pick up that information and include it in their news reports.” Now, the new cloud-based offering further enhances Super Ticker’s superior multi-user collaboration capabilities, with operators able to securely access Super Ticker Cloud from anywhere in the world.

Customers can vary from schools to digital signage to corporations to broadcasters, making Bannister Lake’s offering far more than the conventional “data ticker” offering. “The message we are trying to substantiate is that a ticker service should reach far beyond broadcasters,” Hentsch said. “Our ‘Super Ticker Community’ on AWS makes data aggregation through the Cloud available to everyone, everywhere, at any time.”

Super Ticker Adds Support for the Xignite Financial Data Cloud

Bannister Lake is pleased to announce that Super Ticker now supports the award-winning Xignite Market Data Cloud. Named to the Forbes FinTech 50 list and as one of the “Ten Coolest Brands in Banking”, Xignite provides cloud-based, financial market data APIs with exceptional breadth and depth.

Xignite’s portfolio is truly astounding. With data for more than 50 top global exchanges and top market movers lists, Xignite gives Super Ticker the most complete financial coverage.

Xignite data is easy for Super Ticker customers to use, providing instant results for quotes and leader lists which get mapped into Super Ticker playlists.


The new Xignite reader is available free to all Super Ticker users with active maintenance agreements.

Bannister Lake Software Brings Cloud Agility and Cost Savings to Super Ticker Content Management Solution

Bannister Lake Software is excited to announce Super Ticker Cloud, a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) implementation of the company’s widely-deployed Super Ticker content management solution for data-rich television broadcasts and information display. Running on Amazon Web Services, the new cloud-based offering empowers Super Ticker users with outstanding new levels of scalability, accessibility and cost-efficiency.  

Super Ticker Cloud includes all of the powerful features of on-premises Super Ticker installations, enabling users to aggregate, manage and moderate automated data feeds from dozens of external sources through one consistent web-based interface. Going far beyond news ticker functionality, Super Ticker Cloud allows users to freely combine this rich data with manual input and original content for a wide variety of applications including 24/7 news channels, broadcast programs, special event coverage, sports and venue displays. The new cloud-based offering further enhances Super Ticker’s superior multi-user collaboration capabilities, with operators able to securely access Super Ticker Cloud from anywhere in the world.

Super Ticker Cloud offers attractive cost benefits to broadcasters looking to reduce capital expenditures and better manage their operational expenses. As a SaaS solution, customers can rapidly deploy Super Ticker Cloud without the acquisition, setup and ongoing maintenance costs of on-premises systems to host it. The economic benefits are even more significant for customers using Super Ticker Cloud for short-term projects or one-time events. Such users can deploy cloud-based instances as needed, without over-investing in on-premises infrastructure that will go unused afterwards.

Bannister Lake’s flexible deployment models provide customers with even greater operational agility. Super Ticker Cloud SaaS instances running on Amazon Web Services are available on a subscription basis. Alternatively, customers can purchase Super Ticker to deploy on their preferred cloud provider or their own private cloud. Siloed Content Groups allow Super Ticker Cloud instances to be time-shared between multiple departments or entities while restricting content access. Customers can also leverage automated data replication to create hybrid workflows between on-premises Super Ticker deployments and Super Ticker Cloud.

“As broadcasters accelerate their acceptance and adoption of the cloud, we continue to be at the forefront of addressing their deployment preferences and operational needs,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “Super Ticker was designed from the ground up to be flexible in its implementation, whether installed locally within a facility’s master control environment or virtualized in the cloud. We’re thrilled to be helping our customers combine its benefits with the dynamics, agility and scalability of the AWS cloud.”

Super Ticker Cloud is available now as a monthly or yearly subscription, while Super Ticker continues to be available for on-premises installations. Super Ticker is deployed by numerous leading media organizations ranging from national broadcasters to specialty cable channels and high-profile event producers.

Bannister Lake Adds Advanced Support for US National Weather Service Alert Data Feed

CAMBRIDGE, ON, Canada, June 14, 2016 – Bannister Lake adds Advanced Support for US National Weather Service Alert Data Feed in Super Ticker. Further expanding the extensive array of data source integrations in Super Ticker, we now offer advanced support for the U.S. National Weather Service Alert feed, delivering real-time weather alerts at the national, state, zone and county level. Going well beyond the core information provided in the basic NWS RSS feed, the new Super Ticker parser also captures advanced Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) information including human-readable alert messages and data relating to urgency, severity, certainty and more. This info is mapped into Super Ticker’s Dynamic Fields, from which users can select which fields to use for output display. As always, the new U.S. National Weather Service Alert reader is available at no charge on new systems and to all Super Ticker users with active support agreements.

TSN and Bannister Lake Join Forces for Euro Cup 2016

CAMBRIDGE, ON, Canada, June 9, 2016 – The UEFA Euro 2016 event in France brings together the top 24 teams in Europe to battle it out for this prestigious trophy. Over the month long event, from June 10-July 10th, TSN will be broadcasting all 50 games with the help of Bannister Lake’s Scorebug. Bannister Lake Soccer Scorebug provides a client/server design allowing operators to control multiple scorebugs on multiple character generators simultaneously. This allows a single operator to control both games of the final games of the group stage which get played at the same time. It also means that there’s no need for remote control software but instead uses IP to control the remote CGs from any PC.

 

Using the standard and approved UEFA graphics and Ross XPression CG, BL’s Scorebug provides the finest quality graphics and the easiest to use user interface.

euro2016