Bannister Lake is pleased to announce today that it has completed a major project for popular agribusiness and rural lifestyle channel RFD-TV. RFD-TV is owned by Rural Media Group, INC. (RMG). RMG properties include The Cowboy Channel and Rural Radio Sirius XM channel 147. The Nashville based cable network provides viewers with extensive daily coverage of commodity markets and other business news of special interest to the farming industry.
RFD-TV required Bannister Lake to oversee a number of upgrades
including, the transition to a new data provider, integration of real-time data
into updated graphic engines, create and power graphic tickers, and design and
build a custom application allowing on-air talent to select, edit and control
graphic playout.
Bannister Lake acted as the liaison between data provider Barchart and
the channel to ensure that RFD-TV journalists were receiving the financial and
editorial content required. The development and project teams at Bannister Lake
worked closely with both Barchart data experts and RFD-TV engineering staff to
ensure that RFD-TV’s data calls worked flawlessly. The Bannister Lake financial
application provided news anchors with visibility into real-time commodity
pricing and the ability to quickly create graphical financial charts and
tables. Anchors would then use the application to generate graphic playlists
and take the lists to air without incumbering the control room.
“Bannister Lake provided RFD-TV with an innovative way to take real-time
data from our data provider and give our editorial teams the control they
needed to customize that content,” said David Mitchell, Chief Technology
Officer, RMG. “In addition to generating and populating tickers, we
dramatically sped up our production process by running the entire graphics workflow
from the anchor desk.”
The financial application also included a sponsorship management
component that allows RFD-TV to schedule and execute sponsors’ logos associated
with specific graphic boards. The solution automatically generates logs to
reconcile logo exposure with advertising sales. This solution provides a more
efficient workflow, while managing new revenue opportunities.
“We are pleased to see RFD-TV embracing Chameleon and our custom
financial software solutions. The project represents what we do best, reading
and ingesting complex real-time data sources and providing producers and
editorial teams with the tools they need to disseminate that content to
audiences as efficiently as possible”, said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister
Lake.
In addition to powering tickers for RFD-TV, Bannister Lake also created
tickers for The Cowboy Channel. The 24-hour television network is dedicated to
western sports including bull riding, roping, reining, and barrel racing.
Chameleon plays an instrumental role visualizing results, standings, and event
schedules.