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Bannister Lake Releases Chameleon Version 10 Real-Time Data Aggregation and Graphics Management Solution

Chameleon, Bannister Lake’s data aggregation and graphics management solution is introducing dramatic new enhancements with a strong focus on election data. Within its election module, Chameleon Version 10 improves how election data is ingested and managed. The new release expands the ability to enter manual election results where data feeds may not be available. This is particularly useful in less populated districts or in jurisdictions where it is not practical to organize a real-time results feed. The new functionality also provides an important failsafe in situations where a data feed may have stopped working.

In addition, Chameleon Version 10 dramatically improves the management of referendum and proposition results, providing editorial staff with more options for displaying down-ballot data. The election module also features improved management and filtering for acclaimed candidates.

“We realize that elections are more than just national events. These new features help ensure that broadcasters covering races in remote locations or in smaller communities can use data on-air more effectively,” said Bannister Lake’s President, Georg Hentsch.

The new release highlights Chameleon’s ability to feed data to web widgets, allowing producers to visualize data interactively online or on mobile devices. This feature drives new storytelling opportunities not only for elections, but also for news, sports and financial data. Bannister Lake is also introducing support for automatically sending out tweets based on Chameleon data conditions, enriching live data experiences on social media.

Chameleon Version 10 also provides improved sponsorship management, allowing users to manage campaign and client data more efficiently. The new and improved sponsor module tracks and connects campaigns to specific sponsors, making as-run logging clearer and better defined.

The new version of the product also includes enhanced security features aligned with NIST guidelines with improved password protection. Chameleon now offers clients an upgraded password strength checker and warns users when they are changing their password to a common password based on a list of the 1,000,000 most used passwords.

Version 10 also boosts Chameleon’s query functionality, its ability to filter custom data, introduces media bins for organizing media into containers and additional support for the onboard HTML5 designer tool.

Chameleon Version 10 is now available. Bannister Lake is dedicated to releasing new features and functionality several times a year to improve the capabilities of its software products.

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Bannister Lake Successfully Concludes the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2018 World Final in Monaco

Bannister Lake, the leading provider of professional broadcast data aggregation and visualization solutions, today announced that its Chameleon data aggregation and management software played an integral role in delivering editorial and graphic content for the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2018 Series. The tournament has quickly become one of the world’s most popular eSports events featuring the best Gran Turismo drivers. Chameleon was used during the championships run-ups in Salzburg, Madrid, and Las Vegas leading up to the world finals in Monaco that took place Nov. 16-18. In all, the tournament covered four international regions over a three-month period, ultimately reducing the field of hundreds of contestants down to 30 finalists.

In partnership with Montreal’s The Boombox Group, Bannister Lake provided the event’s data management solution populating graphics both in-venue and for the tournament’s web broadcasts. Chameleon was used to filter data coming from Google Sheets and organize data for each of the competition’s races. Chameleon also provided the event with tournament standings based on points and finish position and its BLADE RESTful API was used to reformat data content to make it readily available to graphics engines for display.

Bannister Lake has worked on numerous eSports and high-profile sporting events including the recent FIFA eWorld Cup™ 2018 and the 2018 US Open Tennis Championships. Both events used Chameleon to aggregate a wide variety of data content, moderate and manage content, and distribute it to various output channels.

“The FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships had its own unique challenges, but we were able to take full advantage of our production experience,” said Al Savoie, Bannister Lake’s technical and creative director who supervised data graphics integration onsite. “A great example of this is our ability to trigger specific graphics directly from the switcher to sync driver cameras, with their corresponding lower thirds. This gave the technical director the ability to go to three boxes at any time and have the correct name, flag, and manufacture of each of the drivers.”

Bannister Lake’s Chameleon has quickly become a popular choice for eSports production, providing a more engaging experience for fans while creating new revenue opportunities for event organizers. By aggregating and displaying multiple real-time data sources, it enables fans to receive added editorial information while allowing sponsors to generate more impressions.

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The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Selects Bannister Lake to Integrate Live Data-Driven Graphics

Bannister Lake, the leading provider of professional broadcast data aggregation and visualization solutions, today announced that the company’s graphic integration services were used to generate key graphics for the special live election night broadcast of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Nov. 6. To help audiences visualize the unfolding results of the midterm elections, The Late Show’s production team turned to Bannister Lake to prepare and integrate graphics into the live broadcast that showed the House of Representatives and the Senate populated with the number of elected officials.

The Late Show used Google Sheets to tie data to the graphics and to manually make changes as required. During the election special, Bannister Lake’s role focused on transforming The Late Show’s creative graphic concepts into templates ready for playout. The graphic work was performed by Bannister Lake’s Creative and Technical Director Al Savoie, and data integration was carried out by The Late Show’s production staff.

“Bannister Lake has a long-standing relationship with key members of the graphics team at The Late Show and when we were asked to help out with its election coverage, we immediately said yes,” said Savoie. “We have done countless election broadcasts integrating data and graphics, but we’re especially honored to have been chosen by The Late Show’s team and take part of midterm election history.”

Bannister Lake provides software and services for managing and visualizing data for a broad range of projects including real-time election results, social media, financial information, sports, news, and weather. Bannister Lake’s flagship software solution, Chameleon, is the industry’s most advanced broadcast data engine that allows users to input any kind of data to populate and manage graphic templates. With Chameleon’s Google Sheets Custom Reader, media producers can automatically pull data content from Google Sheets cells and seamlessly populate graphic templates. In addition, producers are able to take full advantage of Google Sheets’ sharing capabilities, granting access and editing rights to multiple users contributing to the content. Data can be organized by topic and displayed using the Google Sheet tab, with Chameleon’s Google Sheets Custom Reader capable of handling multiple sheets and tabs for an efficient and elegant way to display complex broadcast graphics.

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Bannister Lake Announces Partnership with Live Data Graphic Design Firm Motion Path

Bannister Lake is pleased to announce that it is partnering with Montreal-based broadcast design firm Motion Path to provide complete data visualization solutions for the broadcast and visual communications industry. Bannister Lake’s powerful data management software, custom development solutions, and implementation expertise combined with Motion Path’s award-winning graphic design capabilities creates exciting new storytelling efficiencies and possibilities for news and sports producers, station groups, event producers and digital signage networks.

Bannister Lake provides broadcasters with the industry’s most powerful automated live data management engine, allowing a wide variety of data formats to be parsed, edited, moderated and strategically distributed. Data appears on-air in the form of tickers, sports bugs, full frame graphics and branding elements. Motion Path has carved a unique niche in the broadcast and digital signage industries by providing graphic design services especially created for live data environments. By combining the two, Bannister Lake driven data will populate Motion Path graphics, delivering a powerful amalgamation of outstanding engineering, innovative production workflows and compelling design.

“Having a strong international design partner like Motion Path helps us add value and efficiency to clients who are seeking a flexible and powerful way to populate graphics with live data from any source,” said Georg Hentsch, president of Bannister Lake. “We had an excellent experience working together recently on the Ontario election with TFO and we look forward to working on many more data-rich projects together.”

“Bannister Lake’s data solutions will give our clients a straightforward way to manage complex data sets that will integrate beautifully into our designs,” said Anton Maximovsky, president of Motion Path. “Very often, data management was something our clients struggled with, needing to custom build a solution or had to compromise their expectations. By linking our graphics to Bannister Lake’s solutions, we have opened up many more creative possibilities for our clients.”

Both Bannister Lake and Motion Path are veteran election specialists and have provided broadcast clients with election race software systems and election graphics packages, respectively. Today’s partnership announcement will strengthen both companies’ election offerings and provide a complete end-to-end solution for election producers. The partnership also helps power Motion Path’s breakthrough work in virtual reality and augmented reality by incorporating Bannister Lake’s data tools to drive on-air presentations. Beyond elections, both companies look forward to providing innovative real-time visualization solutions for sports, financial news, events, eSports and digital signage.

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Bannister Lake Chameleon Software Tracks Record Number of Municipal Election Races Across Three Canadian Provinces

Over three days and throughout three provinces, Canadians went to the polls to vote for mayor, city council, school trustee and several other municipal officials. In total there were over 1,400 individual races and thousands of candidates. Bannister Lake’s Chameleon software and its election module tracked all of them delivering live results to Global Television stations and websites in British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario.

Multiple data feeds were used to bring in results data on October 20 from British Columbia, October 22 from Ontario and October 24 from Manitoba. Results data poured in not just from large metropolitan areas such as Toronto and Vancouver but also from smaller remote communities.

“It’s the first time we’ve followed that many individual election races and such a high number of candidates. Chameleon handled it extremely well providing Global with real-time results. We were especially pleased we could ensure that results coming in from remote municipalities with slower data connections were fully optimized to be more efficient”, said George Hentsch, President, Bannister Lake.

Live election data ingested into Chameleon allowed production staff to follow races, create playlists and make calls. Global also used Chameleon’s BLADE RESTful API to populate graphics on-set using augmented reality systems and to feed web objects that provided online users with race results.

Bannister Lake provides broadcast editorial teams with the industry’s most versatile election results system. Chameleon software is managed via a web-based interface that allows an unlimited number of production and technical users access election results data. Teams can then integrate results into various election graphics templates, reformat data and redistribute it to other devices or production systems.

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Bannister Lake and Tagboard Extend Social Media Capabilities Across All Media

Social media plays an integral role in viewer engagement but moderating,visualizing and distributing social content in real-time has its unique challenges. The integration of Tagboard’s community-centric social media platform into Bannister Lake’s Chameleon software provides event and broadcast producers with the ability to manage and distribute social media to the widest variety of display options. Bannister Lake developers created a custom reader for Tagboard helping to ensure that the social media aggregation tool could take full advantage of Bannister Lake’s BLADE RESTful API for strategic distribution to any graphics engine for playback.

At the recent US Open Tennis Championships, Tagboard aggregated and moderated social content from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which was then funneled through Chameleon. Chameleon was used to create and populate 15 different screen layouts that were then distributed to place-based screens throughout the USTA Billie Jean National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, NY.

“At live events, social media provides an immediate sense of interactivity and engagement that adds a great deal of editorial value. By integrating Tagboard into Chameleon we have taken another step towards becoming a complete visualization solution.” says Georg Hentsch, President at Bannister Lake.

Chameleon, Bannister Lake’s powerful data engine, is a robust data management solution that handles multiple data feeds from a diverse set of sources. At the US Open, Chameleon managed over 250,000 XML files corresponding to the participation of over 1000 players playing hundreds of matches. In addition to Tagboard social media content, Chameleon was also responsible for other data sources including weather, event news, schedules, headshots, scores, sets winners, standings and other tournament related data. Player’s personal biographical data such as place of birth, height, weight, handed and others information was also included.

Chameleon’s unique ability to use automation to manage, visualize and distribute a diverse set of real-time data sources provides audiences with timely, relevant content while introducing new storytelling and monetization possibilities to producers.

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Bannister Lake’s Elector Software Powers Global Television’s Coverage of the 2018 New Brunswick Provincial Election

It was one of Canada’s most exciting election nights ending with a minority provincial government and two fringe parties playing a vital role in the final outcome. Once again, Global Television turned to Bannister Lake’s Elector to provide and parse the media consortium data and drive real-time election graphics. Global covered the election online and cut into programming with regular news updates. In addition to populating Global’s broadcast graphics with election results, Bannister Lake software allowed Global to create web solutions that pulled specific election results and displayed them on the globalnews.ca website.

Global used Elector combined with Bannister Lake’s Flow content management solution to provide a complete election night data workflow. Elector incorporates a high level of automation and is managed via a web-based interface that can be accessed by an unlimited number of users. The solution provides editorial teams with the ability to filter and track races, make race calls, and build playlists of graphics to be put to air.

Flow provides broadcasters with the ability to re-purpose content and access it either directly from the database or in an XML or JSON format, which is ideal for use on websites or mobile devices. Bannister Lake’s RESTful API, BLADE can then take the repurposed content and feed it into a web widget or another broadcast presentation solution such as augmented or virtual reality. It’s a powerful end to end solution that is versatile enough to satisfy a wide variety of election night requirements across all platforms.