CustomWeather and Bannister Lake Form Partnership to Create New Business Opportunities in Broadcast and Digital Signage

Bannister Lake and CustomWeather  announced today that they have entered into a partnership to develop joint business opportunities and enable users of Bannister Lake’s Chameleon software to incorporate weather data from specialized weather company, CustomWeather, Inc. CustomWeather is an industry-leading weather data provider featuring forecasts for 85,000 global locations in 95 languages, providing high-resolution forecasts from its proven forecasting model, the CW100.

Bannister Lake’s Chameleon product is an innovative real-time data aggregation and management solution used throughout the broadcast and digital signage industry to power and populate graphic templates. The solution drives news tickers, election results, financial data, wagering, and other editorial applications. Chameleon is also used for on-air branding applications, controlling and populating snipes, bugs, promos, and “coming up next” boards. Chameleon’s RESTful API allows data to be reformatted and strategically distributed to broadcast graphic engines, as HTML5, and be integrated into mobile applications.

 “Bannister Lake’s Chameleon software offers a novel way for us to expand our reach in the broadcast and digital signage market,” said Geoff Flint, President and CEO of CustomWeather. “Our superior weather products combined with Bannister Lake’s expertise in managing real-time data and custom development offers tremendous value to their customers.”

“CustomWeather is an ideal partner for Bannister Lake. Weather data is an important data source for our customer base and CustomWeather’s accuracy and assortment of data products provides an attractive offering for both the broadcast and digital signage market”, said Georg Hentsch, President, Bannister Lake.

Both CustomWeather and Bannister Lake will actively pursue opportunities that leverage each others expertise in creating real-time data and custom software solutions. As data specialists with strong development skills in database, APIs, and applications, Bannister Lake designs, builds, and implements solutions that utilize editorially relevant data sources, such as CustomWeather, to engage audiences and attract advertising revenue.

Bannister Lake Completes Chameleon Integration and Custom Development Project at RFD-TV

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.

TVSN, Australia

Customer: TVSN, Australia

Application: Display inventory data for shopping channel programs & replay programs during overnight hours

Platform: Imagine Communications, G7 system

Printable Version

TVSN is the Australian shopping channel (www.tvsn.com.au) and broadcasts to both Australian and New Zealand. Prior to a broadcast a producer will use the Bannister Lake custom application to select products that will be featured during that show. The software automatically pulls data from TVSN’s inventory database to provides not just product information such as prices, descriptions but also real-time data such as size and color availability based on current inventory levels.

The Overnight replay feature is a special customization provided by Bannister Lake which records a show’s graphics where during the day. Recorded is the graphic template displayed and the timecode it was displayed at. During ‘overnight’ hours TVSN replays shows recorded earlier in the day. These are clean recordings, meaning no graphics. The Bannister Lake software plays the templates automatically based on the recorded timecode, only the data of inventory levels and availability are updated and reflect the correct numbers.

 

TVSN Solution

Yahoo Finance

Customer: Yahoo Finance

Application: Yahoo Finance Application

Printable Version

Yahoo Finance approached Bannister Lake to produce a dedicated financial application to drive all graphic content for their online Financial Channel.

  • Finance Client application authenticates and connects to Yahoo Financial data feed.
  • Client UI provides stock ticker preview and modules to create Bugs, Stock Charts, Name Keys and Lower Thirds.
  • Quick filters to setup stock chart comparisons, desktop preview of charts then quick add to playlist.
  • Drop Down range menu to select time including, Intraday padded, Intraday, 2 day padded, 5 day, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, Year to Date padded, 1 > 5 year and user defined (Custom) ranges.
  • Client app connects securely to Finance Server app in production to generate graphic output for presentation.

 

 

 

Rogers Cable – Super Sports Pak

Customer: Rogers Cable (York Mills)
Application: Super Sports Pak (SSP) Application
Platform: RossVideo XPression Studio

Printable Version

Bannister Lake provided an automated broadcast display solution to generate league and game schedules for Rogers Cable Super Sports Pak subscription channel lineup on Rogers, Cogeco, Eastlink and Videotron.

  • Main SSP schedule file is updated daily with game schedules for each subscription sports channel.
  • SSP application reads current date on schedule file, then generates a sequence of league games with output channel assignment, service provider and channel number.
  • To ensure proper timing, each page duration is calculated on the default event duration multiplied by the number of records.
  • Preferences to enable and set the display order for each service provider and league.
  • App automatically substitutes Background images for blank (scratches) in the schedule.
  • Drop down dialog to select ‘end of sequence’ Promos images.
  • SSP logs all application activity, sequence generation and output.
  • Schedule switches over to next day at 2 am ET and removes old sequence.

Rogers Sportsnet – Inscriber G3 HD/SD with SMS, Voting and PUPman.

Customer: Rogers Sportsnet
Application: Bannister Lake display engine with SMS and PupMan (Pop Up promotions)
Solution: Gscribe with RTX ports, Bannister Lake display engine with MyThum SMS system.
Platform: Dual Channel HD/SD Inscriber G3 system.

Printable Version

Rogers Sportsnet required a dual-channel CG for their master control to display trouble slides, insert programming changes and manage the display of SMS and Voting messages for their prime time interactive sports programs.

  • MyThum solution aggregates SMS and Voting messages from viewers, then forwards them to SMS/POP server.
  • Bannister Lake SMS/Chicker interface manages and moderates display of incoming MyThum SMS and voting messages sent from POP (email) server.
  • SMS/Chicker application inserts current scores, SMS sponsor logos and taglines.
  • BLSoft PUPman application allows TD’s to manually enter and display messages for program changes and special announcements.
  • GScribe Character Generator is used for trouble slides and custom boards.
  • Using independent output layers, the Gscribe CG, SMS and PUPman applications output concurrently to both channels.
  • System supports HD and SD output.

Rogers Media – The Shopping Channel

Customer: The Shopping Channel
Application: Bannister Lake Macro Application and Still Store
Platform: RossVideo XPression Studio

Printable Version

The Shopping Channel, Canada’s premiere broadcast retail Channel based in Mississauga Ontario worked with Bannister Lake to develop an automated broadcast graphics solution for their broadcast workflow.

  • Bannister Lake Macro Application reads the product inventory database to generate graphics for each one-hour segment.
  • Name Keys, Colors, Sizes, Star Rating and product availability is also generated with each segment.
  • Operators can manually intervene to edit or modify segments and Text content while on air.
  • Recap stills of each segment are captured by the Still Store, then saved to IPV for archive and proof of play.
  • A log file is generated for each take item with Time Stamp, Item number and Product Description
  • The log is encoded into the clean feed for Digital and Web applications.
  • This configuration is mirrored in the Main and Backup Control Rooms for redundancy.

Cheddar TV

Cheddar TV required a comprehensive Financial Dashboard application to manage and generate all on air graphics for their daily broadcast from the New York Stock Exchange.

Printable Version

  • Dashboard application automatically connects to Xignite Financial data feed.
  • UI provides stock ticker preview and modules to create Bugs, Stock Charts, Bumpers, Name Keys, Lower Thirds and Banners.
  • Quick filters to setup stock chart comparisons, desktop preview of charts then quick add to playlist;
  • Click drag and drop to change items in playlists.
  • Drop Down range menu to select time including, Intraday padded, Intraday, 2 day padded, 5 day, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, Year to Date padded, 1 > 5 year and user (Custom) ranges.
  • Application supports overnight (after market) generation of content.

Univision Entertainment – Sabado Gigante

Customer: Univision Entertainment – Sabado Gigante
Application: Game Controllers

Printable Version

Bannister Lake developed a series of Game controllers for Univision Entertainment’s popular weekend variety program, Sabato Gigante, hosted by Don Francisco.

  • Rules, User Interface (UI) and 3D graphics were developed for 5 Games, Lotto, Race Game, HotRod, Roulette and Word Game.
  • 3D graphics and media for each Game were integrated into RossVideo XPression CG graphics for broadcast playout.
  • All games and graphic output from XPression were remotely controlled by Don and guests using a touch screen interface to the game UI with stop and reset capabilities for retakes.

Red Bull/ Alpha Sports/ TSN – Red Bull Crashed Ice 2009

Customer: Red Bull/ Alpha Sports/ TSN
Application: Race Results Display Solution
Platform: Inscriber/Harris RTX G3 HD platform

Printable Version

Red Bull and Alpha Sports required a real-time HD display solution to overlay race results for the Red Bull Crashed Ice 2009 Telecast on TSN.

  • Solution interprets race data to output track positions during race and finish times as they occur.
  • System preserves all racer progress to track racers through heats and provide on the fly heat/bracket displays.
  • Application instantly outputs racer name, origin, country flag as lower thirds and optional headshot graphics for camera pans during race starts.
  • Radar gun captures racer current speed direct to air.
  • System also provides the ability to export race data for connectivity with other broadcast display systems. (Inscriber, Chyron, Pinnacle or Vizrt)
  • Complete solution is ready for broadcast in less than 5 minutes.