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Bannister Lake to Be Represented by US-Based Sales Organization, Media Technology Group

Bannister Lake announced today that the company has entered into a nonexclusive representation agreement with Akron, Ohio-based broadcast sales organization Media Technology Group (MTG). MTG will showcase Bannister Lake’s Chameleon product to the broadcast industry and participate in co-marketing ventures.

Chameleon is an industry-leading software solution used to manage real-time data and populate graphic templates for news tickers, election results, financial data, wagering, and other applications. The same product also drives on-air branding by leveraging real-time data to power snipes, bugs, promos, and “coming up next” boards. Chameleon’s RESTful API allows data to be reformatted and strategically distributed to broadcast graphic engines, HTML5, online, and mobile applications.

“We are thrilled to be working with Bannister Lake,” said Rich Hajdu, president of Media Technology Group. “We recognize the broadcast and media industries’ demand for real-time content. Bannister Lake provides a solution that not only makes it easy for video users to leverage real-time data for news and information channels, but also provides broadcasters with a path to new revenues that is extremely attractive.”

MTG is a full-service sales and support organization targeting video and media users in multiple areas including broadcast, corporate, government, education, and houses of worship. MTG specializes in providing innovative products that elegantly solve specific workflow and production problems. The company selects products from the best global partners with a common theme: rock-solid software, intuitive operation, and powerful features that streamline repetitive tasks. MTG products are to bring high performance and reliability to top-tier facilities.

“Media Technology Group offers us an additional way to get our innovative products and services in front of decision-makers. Their industry knowledge and product experience are unparalleled, and we look forward to working together,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake.

As the news cycle continues to accelerate and audiences rely heavily on vital news and information content, real-time data has become an essential part of the editorial mix. Chameleon leverages real-time data to enhance storytelling, improve production workflows, and create exciting new business opportunities in broadcast, streaming, and digital signage.

For more information about the Media Technology Group, please visit https://mediatgrp.com .

More information about Bannister Lake’s solutions is available at www.bannisterlake.com.

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Bannister Lake to Launch Webinar Series Focusing on Its Chameleon Real-Time Data Aggregation and Management Solution

Bannister Lake is pleased to announce today that it will be presenting a series of casual, 30-minute Chameleon product education webinars over a three-week period beginning on Tuesday, May 5, 2020. Each Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific, Bannister Lake will showcase Chameleon’s unique feature set directed at broadcast, web, and digital signage professionals.

Chameleon is a multi-module, web-based, real-time data management solution popular in the broadcast, OTT, and signage sectors. It is used to create custom news tickers, launch automated information channels, track and visualize election results, manage snipes and branding elements, and much more.

The product also includes Chameleon Designer, a powerful template design and data connection tool. Chameleon Designer serves as a unique, single solution to build projects that can be simultaneously used on NDI, SDI, or web platforms.

The first webinar, kicking off on May 5, will focus on tickers and introduce Chameleon’s data ingestion workflow, content management features, and integration of sponsorships. The session is designed for news producers, station management, as well as engineers looking to integrate more timely news content into their programming while generating new revenue opportunities. 

The second webinar, on Tuesday May 12, will center on Chameleon’s enhanced election production capabilities. The webinar will discuss the product’s ability to ingest real-time election results and provide election producers with the ability to track and filter results, make race calls, and quickly create graphic playlists for air. There will also be a look at the product’s RESTful API, where users can distribute customized election data to various devices and endpoints, including mobile devices, websites, augmented reality systems, and social media.

The third webinar, being held on Tuesday May 19, will feature Chameleon’s on-air branding capabilities. This session will explore how the product is used for managing and scheduling promotional snipes, bugs, and full-frame “coming up” billboards. The webinar will also include information about automation, asset management, and advertising campaigns.

“With the cancellation of NAB and the public, now more than ever, depending on news and information that is constantly being updated, we felt that reaching out directly through these focused webinars was important,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “This is a great opportunity to learn more about Chameleon and how it can best serve audiences.”

Real-time data provides producers, engineers, and management with unprecedented ways to tell stories, leverage automation, and expand reach into new platforms. Please join Bannister Lake to learn more about these exciting opportunities.

To register for any or all of these webinars please visit https://bannisterlake.com/webinar-registration.

Webinar Schedule:

Tuesday, May 5, at 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific: Chameleon Tickers

Tuesday, May 12, 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific: Chameleon Elections

Tuesday, May 19, 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific: Chameleon Branding 

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Bannister Lake’s Chameleon Powers Real-Time Data for Global News OTT Channels

Bannister Lake announced today that its Chameleon real-time data management product is being used to support the Global Television Network’s new OTT initiatives. Chameleon is used to control and customize a variety of news, weather, and financial data feeds as well as to manage advertising and promotional content. Global News has launched one national and four regional OTT streams providing viewers with live, 24/7 news and information.

Bannister Lake provided Global Television with a suite of software products, including its Chameleon Web Player, that renders national and localized ticker content for each channel. Also included is the Chameleon Branding Player that displays ads for each channel while generating as-run logs. The project represents revolutionary new approaches that are more efficient and cost-effective when rendering HTML5 graphics for overlay in streams. Instead of rendering graphics using traditional graphic engines, costing tens of thousands of dollars, rendering is performed by inexpensive Raspberry Pi 4 computers.

The Global Television Network is a long-time client of Bannister Lake and uses Chameleon in a wide variety of ways to extend its editorial and business reach. The product is used daily to control and populate data-driven graphics for local morning shows and as an aggregator and distributor of news content for the network’s digital signage initiatives. Bannister Lake also provides Global with an industry-leading election solution that allows producers to track real-time results, make race calls, build graphic playlists, and distribute custom election data to any endpoint.

“Having Bannister Lake contribute to our OTT project just made sense,” said Gerry Belec, national director, news technology and operations, Global News. “The Chameleon product has the flexibility and reliability we required to add real-time data to our streaming news channels.”

Bannister Lake’s Chameleon product is used extensively throughout the broadcast television market and is used by a handful of American OTT clients. The recent work with Global Television represents the company’s first move into the Canadian streaming sector. 

“We’re always excited to work with Global and explore new ways our solutions can be used to reach Canadians,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “Moving into Canadian OTT represents an important new market opportunity as the media landscape continues to evolve.”

Global Television’s OTT news channels are available through the network’s Global TV app and are currently available on Amazon Prime.

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Bannister Lake To Provide Covid-19 Data Through Its Community Aggregation Service

Bannister Lake announced today that as a public service offering, it is making authoritative COVID-19 data available to its customers via its built-in Community data aggregation service. Community collects data from credible public sources such as the World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins and ingests it directly into Bannister Lake’s Chameleon data aggregation and management solution. In addition, the company has developed a world map-based web widget populated with the same COVID-19 data illustrating the extent of the outbreak. Recognizing that as the virus spreads, reliable data is essential for audiences to understand the rapidly changing situation and to respond accordingly, Bannister Lake is making the data and widget available as a public service.

“At a time like this, real-time data from trustworthy sources is the only way audiences can keep up with news about the global pandemic,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “We understand the vital role media organizations play at this time. We want to do our part by supporting their communications efforts with immediate availability of our data and widgets free of charge.”

Within Chameleon, users can manage and integrate local, national and international news, closings, alerts, financial data and other topical content to create a complete view of the COVID-19 situation. This content can then be outputted as tickers, L-Bars, data-populated graphics or fully automated information channels. Chameleon’s RESTful API can be used to strategically distribute data to different broadcast graphic engines, digital signage systems, or as HTML5 for online and mobile distribution.

Media organizations can further query and edit COVID-19 related data to create a variety of custom visualizations including geographically focused datasets, charts, tables, and indicators. Users can schedule the playback of specific data to target particular markets or platforms with data content that may be especially important to that audience. Bannister Lake will continue to develop data parsers incorporating data from reliable sources to ensure that media organizations and their audiences have access to the most up-to-date and accurate content. Customers interested in integrating the data or requiring technical support can email info@bannisterlake.com.

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Getting to the Heart of the Story: Superior On-Air Data Presentations with Chameleon’s Query Functionality

Making sense out of vast amounts of data is a challenge facing anyone involved with the information economy. But this challenge is especially onerous in the world of broadcast television. Broadcasters not only have to retrieve the vital content they require editorially, they then must edit it, moderate it, visualize it and manage its distribution. In a breaking news situation, this process must happen quickly and accurately. As broadcasters launch various companion services on cable, the web, OTT and digital signage, for different audiences and with different revenue models, the management of data content becomes even more complex.

Bannister Lake’s Chameleon software product includes a powerful data parsing tool called Query that provides producers with incredible flexibility and adept data management features. Query allows specific data assets to be identified, modified and in conjunction with BLADE, Chameleon’s RESTful API, be brought into and played back through virtually any graphics engine, including on the web. Bannister Lake developed Query to fully leverage the power of SQL SELECT across its database schema. This functionality allows data-sets to be aggregated, grouped and fully customized providing real time, dynamic results. Furthermore, specific queries can be saved, modified and shared among users across an entire organization, vastly improving on-air editorial, refining workflows and putting content to air. A typical example may be a broadcaster that needs to pull only the National Weather Service data pertaining to potential wildfire conditions. Query can parse through all the NWS data and pull only the data-sets that correspond to specific locations, temperature, precipitation and geographic conditions. BLADE can then be used to bring this data content into a graphic engine, a virtual reality system or a ticker for real-time visualization.

By applying the combination of Query and BLADE functionality, media organizations can insure that their extensive investments in data content tell the best story possible while being comprehensively monetized leading to a greater ROI.

Query of NHL Top 10 Goals

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Chameleon: Drive On-Air Graphics Directly from Google Sheets

With Chameleon’s new Google Sheets Custom Reader, media producers can automatically pull data content from Google Sheet cells and populate graphic templates. Producers can take advantage of Google Sheets’ sharing capabilities and have multiple users contributing content. Plus, content can be organized and displayed using the Google sheet tab which automatically provides a topic name for content.

Chameleon’s Google Sheets Custom Reader can handle multiple sheets and tabs providing an efficient and simple way to display complex graphics for broadcast, signage and web. It’s an elegant way to present sports scores, ESports content and News tickers.

Chameleon is the industry’s most advanced broadcast data engine providing users the ability to input any kind of data to populate and manage graphic templates.

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Bannister Lake’s Chameleon: From Branding to Tickers, The Industry’s Single Solution for Data Driven Graphics.

Broadcasters everywhere are recognizing the revenue opportunities,operational efficiencies and cost-savings that can be realized by fully leveraging data. Television stations, networks, OTT services, digital signage networks and other digital media operations use data in two distinct ways; to manage internal operations (traffic systems, advertising accounting systems) and to visualize specific content on-air (news, weather, sports, promos). But connecting the two and in turn creating, administering and monetizing graphical content associated with data has always been a challenge.

Bannister Lake’s Chameleon resolves the complexities of data-graphics co-ordination by providing media organizations with a single powerful solution for managing, visualizing and distributing any data type. Chameleon combines the features and capabilities of two of Bannister Lake’s previous products, Super Ticker and Brando, to create a powerful solution that is both data and playout agnostic.

Bannister Lake takes the position that no matter if the requirement is displaying live news tickers, presenting election results, running snipes or the strategic co-ordination with a station’s traffic system, a single solution can and should provide all the necessary requirements to use data efficiently and productively.

Though playout agnostic, Chameleon extends its tight integration with Ross Video XPression and improved support with XPression Project Server including automated deployment, ensuring all systems across the network have the latest, up-to-date, graphic templates.

Chameleon provides full “as run” logs for promos and sponsorships with a variety of support specifically for campaign tracking including the ability to track and account for promos and sponsorships throughout the broadcast day.

Chameleon’s Query function provides broadcasters with the flexibility to use data sources in exciting new ways to create rules governing the playback of content. Stations can leverage a variety of external and internal data conditions to determine if and when branding and sponsorship content should appear on-air. For example, a soft drink snipe may only appear when the temperature reaches a certain threshold, or a special baseball themed offer may only appear when the home team has won the game. Query also allows media organizations to co-ordinate and trigger other related content alongside sponsorships and promos to drive new revenue. A commercial for a car dealership could automatically trigger a snipe promoting a new program sponsored by the same car dealership. Using Query broadcast sales can create premium sponsorship offers that are targeted or co-ordinated with specific events.

Complex co-ordination with multiple media outlets is made easy with Chameleon. As a single software solution managing centralized data, advertising and promos can be strategically positioned to help audiences migrate to various companion media properties. This creates new revenue possibilities by organizing and managing campaigns across several different media channels.

Chameleon’s ‘Tag Time’ feature allows media organizations to leverage data and templating to update and position promos strategically. Tag Time automatically places promos at pre-planned spots during the daypart to pull audiences into primetime.

Chameleon from Bannister Lake is the industry’s only “one-stop” solution that transforms any kind of data into graphic content that can be used on the widest variety of editorial, branding and sponsorship applications. With features that drive new revenue and simplify operations, Chameleon provides media organizations with a path to new revenue opportunities and cost savings while executing flawlessly on-air.

About Bannister Lake Inc.
Bannister Lake is a leading provider of professional video graphic display solutions for broadcast television, cable, satellite, audio/visual and information presentation applications worldwide. Our solutions integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure while automating the integration and display of external data sources, improving the productivity of your organization.

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Bannister Lake Chameleon powers The Morning Show on Global News

Bannister Lake Chameleon plays a key role delivering real-time content for The Morning Show on Global News across Canada. Chameleon manages News, Weather, Sports, Traffic, Finance and Promos for playout, ingesting and managing everything from international news to local sports scores for regional playout.

Global’s use of BLADE, Chameleon’s restful API, enabled their technical and creative team to deliver a compelling localized on air presentation for multiple locations.

Chameleon delivers live content for RossVideo XPression, Vizrt, Chyron, Pixel Power, ClassX, Imagine Versio and many other broadcast graphics platforms.

Global News Morning Show

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Bannister Lake Elector delivers Ontario Election results to Three Broadcasters in English and French.

Bannister Lake played an important role during coverage of the June 7th Ontario 42nd general election delivering flawless results throughout the evening for three Ontario broadcasters. Bannister Lake’s Elector product provided editorial teams at Global Television, TVO and French language public broadcaster TFO with real-time results, advanced race filtering, and the ability to quickly and accurately create graphic playlists for broadcast.

Unlike previous elections, Elections Ontario utilized tabulators at many polling stations across the province which dramatically speed up the distribution of results data. Elector’s multi-user, web-based UI easily handled the deluge of data and provided producers and analysts with newsworthy voting trends, the ability to accurately make race calls and in turn translate those trends into powerful graphic presentations.

This election marked Global Television’s twelfth time using Elector on a major election broadcast. Beyond conventional broadcast graphics, Global used Elector’s RestAPI to integrate election data directly into augmented reality and virtual reality elements creating 3D interactive environments that complimented storytelling.

TVO first used Elector for the 2011 Ontario election and again in 2014. For the 2018 election broadcast, TVO used Elector to create a more analytical program featuring a wide variety of live data graphics that provided editorial context and insight.

This election was TFO’s first experience with Elector. TFO’s broadcast focused on Ontario’s Francophone population and used a combination of augmented and traditional graphics to convey the impact of election night. To accommodate TFO’s French language requirements, Bannister Lake translated the Elector UI into French ensuring TFO staff was able to fully utilize Elector’s capabilities. TFO also extended their broadcast by making their Elector generated graphics available on Facebook Live.

Bannister Lake provided all three broadcasters with a variety of professional services that complimented and enhanced their editorial and on-air capabilities. The Bannister Lake data integration team worked closely with the Canadian Media Election Consortium to ensure that results data flowed perfectly into each broadcaster’s Elector systems. The creative team led graphics integration connecting live data to graphic templates while ensuring that graphics performance was optimized. Bannister Lake led training sessions for editorial and production staff.

Elector is used throughout Canada and the US delivering reliable election night results and analysis for federal, regional and municipal races. An industry staple for over fourteen years, Elector can drive 2D and 3D graphic displays across any broadcast graphic playout system.

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Chameleon: The Culmination of Brando & Super Ticker

Chameleon is simply that, the very best of 2 separate products brought together. As a whole Chameleon is certainly greater than the sum of its predecessors: Brando & Super Ticker.

Putting ticker and news functionality together with branding isn’t a new idea. At its most rudimentary level, branding layers such as logos are placed over top of existing ticker elements. Not until the arrival of Chameleon have these 2 distinct workflows been integrated together, not just slapped over top each other.

Chameleon Sample Output

Shown here, the programming schedule read from traffic is fully integrated into one Chameleon interface so that both elements from news and branding can take advantage of programming data. Sponsors and as run logs can all be managed from this one singular UI. Of course Chameleon is still multi user content management solution so many producers and can be working on it at the same time.

Chameleon-UI

In the end, Chameleon is end of the long evolutionary road of 2 amazing products finally coming together.