Customer Success Story

By adopting Vimond´s VIA Live, a channel planning and monitoring solution, TV 2 improved its day-to-day operations. The result is a massive improvement in their scheduling & distribution workflow, enabling them to continue scaling their sports offering for all Norwegian viewers.

The Challenge

TV 2 Norway has, throughout the years, offered one of the most premium sports streaming services in Norway. The English Premier League, Summer and Winter Olympics, UEFA Champions League, FIFA World Cup, Tour de France, UEFA European Championship – the list goes on.

However, this broad content library offered a challenge when broadcasting live events digitally: It created a lot of manual work for their online editorial sports teams. These are some of them:

• Creating event assets in their digital OTT CMS
• Populating them with the correct metadata and images
• Managing the broadcast times and schedules
• Linking the digital assets with the correct feeds and encoders
• Managing publication rights and the live-to-VOD workflows
• Monitoring the live event’s performance and stability.

Each of these tasks was required whenever they wanted to broadcast a live event (and multiplied by the number of events).

TV 2 can often average between 50 and 100 individual live sporting events in a normal weekend, meaning a busy day would require multiple people to successfully broadcast all events.

This created several problems for TV 2. Most importantly, it tied up valuable personnel hours and increased costs, and it also increased the chances of human error during broadcasts.

The Solution

After adopting Vimond’s VIA Live module, TV 2 has been able to automate most manual tasks required to deliver a live event.

While managing metadata for both linear and OTT distribution in PROVYS during the planning phase, VIA Live will automatically pick up this information and ingest the asset placeholders with the relevant broadcast times into the main OTT platform system, Vimond VIA.

Once the event goes live, VIA Live will ensure that the stream is available to the public at the start of the broadcast.

VIA Live will also ensure the correct publication rights and live-to-VOD workflows are met and followed, removing the need for any manual post-event work.

By automatically populating the OTT CMS with assets from PROVYS, VIA Live also gives TV 2’s online editors a dedicated user interface for live event management.

Through this interface, editors can make instant changes and adjustments to the digital assets and schedules on the fly, enabling them to work freely without being dependent on other systems and/or departments.

The Result

By TV 2 adapting VIA Live, enabling them to move much of the manual work upstream, the online sports operators now enjoy an automated live event workflow. With a vastly improved workflow and a much more streamlined process, TV 2’s online teams can now focus their precious efforts on something other than repetitive manual labour during live operations.

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"Almost all the manual work with single play-out is done during the planning and as such we have way less work during the actual production. Today, three people dealt with 18 online productions + one linear. A year ago, this would have demanded a lot of hands. And best of all, no issues at all'' 

– Alexander Breidvik, Coordinator of Sports, TV 2 Play