Author: unition

HOW TO DESCRIBE ANY COMPLEX CAMPAIGN

Have you ever received a request from a client for an advertising campaign like this one? They demand a December campaign where spots should be scheduled across three channels instead of the usual 5. It is not a problem. They also need to spread the budget over four weeks in the ratio of 20-30-30-20. But no spots during Christmas days. Besides, spots on the premium channel have to be placed only in prime time. The total audience rating of these commercials must reach 80% of the planned GRP. Other channels have to be scheduled in the off-time period, and at least 60% of GRP should be achieved by the spots in the first position in the break. Yeah, and let’s say 10 GRP has to come from a specific time zone and this and that … Are you lost yet? Don’t worry, PROVYS follows it all for you. Divide the campaign budget into channels. Spread it out by weeks or define specific days. Define how much money you want to allocate for a particular spot position during a break. Combine the spot duration you need to use. The values can be entered in prices or units (like GRP) absolutely or proportionally. This preferential tree of customer requirements has been designed to allow unlimited requirement variability in ten various dimensions. You don’t have to design the campaign breakdown again. Instead, create your own set of preference tree templates. Not only will you save time, but you will also avoid mistakes, making sure that you have not forgotten anything. In connection with auto-booking, PROVYS can also… but let’s talk about that next time. To sum up, when a complex client request lands on your desk again, you don’t have to worry about it. PROVYS can handle it.

Want to know more? Let’s meet and talk!

LET THE SYSTEM DO THE TRICKY WORK!

Do you want to have complete control over your campaign planning? And yet not spend hours in front of the screen and manually book one spot after another? Use the PROVYS Autobooking product package! The auto-booking engine, together with the campaign requirements, plans commercials for you. Our very own algorithm allows simultaneous evaluation according to several criteria and offers six scoring methods. These methods have unlimited combinations. You can optimize the total campaign revenues, GRP or optimize block occupancy across the commercial inventory. Thus, you can easily tune up the autobooking algorithm. Design your combinations just once and use them repeatedly! Each campaign has its preferences. Each campaign has its own importance. Each campaign is unique. We know that. But still, there are standard workflows to satisfy all these individual requests. Do you need to control prime time and keep the rest for autobooking? Do you want to plan campaigns completly or only partially? Or even over-book them? Do you plan one by one or in bulk? PROVYS meets all these needs. Be able to concentrate on your premium clients by saving time with the planning of regular campaigns. So, combine, design and let’s automate. PROVYS reliably calculates what pays off for you. Get your money’s worth!

Do you want to try it too? Call and make an appointment with us.

HOW TO STORE SEVERAL IMAGES TO ONE TITLE?

We all know it. Each platform needs its very own materials of various formats and types for content promotion. PROVYS allows you to describe an unlimited number of images for one title, including a description of technical metadata and image categorization. Say NO to multiple storage places used only for images. Keep everything in PROVYS. Don’t be limited by the technical possibilities of the system and attract your viewers as best you can!

Do you want to learn more? Contact us for more details.

GET USE OF PROVYS SIMPLE BUDGETING!

Are you wrestling with a budget all the time? Do you need to know if the content cost is within slot price limit? Is it within your budget? Our new product package Simple Budgeting keeps an eye on it. PROVYS calculates a price limit for each slot and compares it with an estimated price of the content. This comparison is available at any time. Your budgeting should be as easy as one-two-three with PROVYS!

Are you interested? Contact us for more details.

New top management appointments at PROVYS

New top management appointments at PROVYS

Monika Zabadalová has been appointed the new Director of Human Resources and Petr Adamec the new Director of Operations at PROVYS as of November 1, 2020.

Monika & Petr’s appointment continues the process of change at PROVYS that started in the autumn of 2019. The aim of these changes is to strengthen the company’s position on the international market of broadcast management systems. They will both report in their roles directly to Josef Vašica, CEO of DCIT, a.s.

Monika’s appointment follows her long-standing cooperation with both DCIT divisions, the Security division and PROVYS. Monika will be responsible for the company’s HR agenda, focusing on the development of leadership, talent, and internal communication.

“Our customers‘ needs are changing today more than ever and we want to continue to support them in their daily activities through our products and services. That is why it is important to make sure the skills of our employees correspond to this new reality. And I want to focus on that presently, “

said Monika about her appointment.

Monika has been working in the HR field for more than 12 years. Previously she worked at JOBPOINT, where she provided consultations, recruitment services and career counseling to corporate clients from various industries. She graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Economics in Bratislava.

Petr will be responsible for the Delivery and Technology Department. He is an experienced program and project manager, and his main priority will be to increase the efficiency of our implementation projects.

“I see PROVYS as a major player in the market for software solutions for television companies. And we will continue to build on that. Our task will be to increase the speed and efficiency of our implementation projects by strengthening the cooperation of our specialists within our teams.”

said Petr Adamec about his new role.

Petr has more than 20 years of experience with international projects in the field of IT, telco, finance and banking. His latest work experience was at Thales (formerly Gemalto), where he worked as Senior Project Manager for the past 5 years. Before Thales, he was also involved with SAS, Hewlett-Packard, Telefonica O2 and ČSOB as a project manager. Petr is a graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague.

PROVYS to organize very own virtual IBC

PROVYS is Helping Broadcasters Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

PROVYS has been on the broadcast market for 23 years, survived several economic crises and gone through numerous trends. For us at PROVYS, all these years has meant a lot of learning and growing with our customers. We have been there when they achieved success but also during the difficult times too, but we are always ready to tackle new challenges. So in the time of the current COVID-19 crisis, PROVYS is ready to help, offering you professional support and consultancy.
At the same time, we have come up with the following things that can quickly help broadcasters:

Make use of managed services. Now on demand more than ever!

PROVYS understands the implications of this unhappy period full of restrictions on travel and personal contact. We have to react to new needs, new ways of implementation as well as SLAs. Therefore, we have gone to great lengths to offer PROVYS products in the cloud and also made them available as a managed service. This will allow you to reduce the deployment time to a minimum and bring your services to viewers faster than ever. 

Start quickly a new channel with PROVYS Everywhere

Start a new channel quickly, it might even be a web, IPTV or niche TV channel. At present, broadcasters are forced to react to market changes almost on a daily basis. You may want to reach you viewers with monothematic channels devoted to certain topics or age groups. As a bonus, we will be glad to offer you our own software playout solution. If you are looking for a partner that will solve this problem quickly and comprehensively, PROVYS is the one to rely on. 

Reach more viewers with PROVYS OnDemand Bridge

Digital consumption and streaming are seeing rapid growth nowadays. So here is your chance to publish your content online and reach higher audience levels with PROVYS OnDemand Bridge. The product is well suited to help broadcasters in the current crisis with cost-effective non-linear services. It also has a significant impact in terms of cost management, effective use of rights, revenue maximizing and maintaining control over the entire environment of both linear and non-linear broadcasting. 

What Makes Public Broadcasters Tick?

When British inventor John Logie Baird first presented a functional television system on 25 March, 1925, in London, nobody could have possibly predicted that within less than 100 years, the average westerner would spend 10 years of their life watching TV. Following his invention, TV broadcasting developed mainly as a public service, being the domain of governments (except for the business-oriented US, unsurprisingly). Europe learned its lesson from the US after the Second World War and allowed the introduction of commercial TV broadcasting. The focus of this article will be principally on the development and current operating methodologies of the public sector. The principal objective of public broadcasters is public service, i.e. “speaking to and engaging as a citizen”. The British model is generally accepted as a standard definition and embodies the following characteristics: universal geographic accessibility in which all parts of the nation must be serviced; universal appeal by which all sectors of the community must be able to find something interesting; attention must be given to minorities in order to achieve balance, a feeling of inclusion, a contribution to national identity and a sense of community; a clear distance from commercially vested interests; funding from either licence fees or taxation together with a certainty of universality of payment; striving for quality programming rather than financial figures, and regulatory guidelines that liberate rather than restrict broadcasting content.

“These solutions can provide a shining example of how technology can save costs and light the way to a bright future for broadcasters”

In addition to the general guidelines, every public broadcaster should also encourage technological innovation, maintaining a leading position in research and development in line with its mission. On the subject of technology, it is incumbent to work in partnership with other organisations and to deploy the highest standards of R&D and new technologies. Today, these technologies are advancing at breakneck speed; viewers’ expectations are growing at a similar rate. It is, therefore, necessary for all technologies associated with both operations and management to keep pace with these rapid developments. A classic example of such change would be television archives which have transitioned from huge physical libraries of reels through digital cassettes and into different types of digital storage.

Whilst in the past, we had miles of shelves of structured and well-described content which required physical manipulation together with a perfect description and categorisation of the content, today, the modern broadcast station has made its life easier by storing such content on highly accessible servers. Using a modern management tool such as Provys, operators can exploit all the benefits of full-text search, automation and even AI to locate and retrieve any required content, literally in a split second. Thus, broadcasters can do much more with less, meaning less time, effort and staff, to improve efficiency and the general quality of programming, including, for example, catering to minority interests, which may require different operational procedures. And this is particularly important in the public service sector which usually operates with licensing conditions that require this. By choosing a supplier with wide experience in this sphere, a public broadcaster can be empowered, even with their fixed budget limitations, to compete successfully with commercial stations who enjoy the advantage of more flexibility and funding options. In addition to daily operations such as planning, scheduling and traffic, modern software-based management tools are also extremely useful in reducing costs and streamlining the complex tasks of in-house production, a traditional activity of public service broadcasters. Furthermore, these systems, especially resource management and capacity planning, are able to shine an “IT spotlight” on the activities of operatives, alongside the spotlights which illuminate the events in the production studio. As a result, “the introduction of such modern systems may experience resistance from operatives who have previously been able to somewhat hide their efficiency in the shadows. But invariably, these solutions can provide a shining example of how technology can save costs and light the way to a bright future for broadcasters” says Jan Hrdlicka, Managing Director, Provys.

Celebration of Young Talent at IBC

Returning again from the IBC in Amsterdam, I am now a little more optimistic about the future of the media industries, particularly broadcasting. I feel that this year brought a lot of new young blood to the show, heralding the long-awaited new generation who the dinosaurs, such as myself, hope to get to know with a view to sharing our knowledge and experience, before we bequeath the heavy responsibilities inherent in this rapidly developing sector to them.

The IBC 2019 has reported a rise in total attendance for this year’s show to 56,390 from 55,884 attendees compared to the IBC 2018. Most significant, however, is that the number of attendees, aged 35 and under, increased by 10% year-on-year, which is a record increase according to the organisers. This statistical trend follows closely the shift from hardware to software in our industry illustrating the need to leave behind ancient expressions such as PAL and SECAM which have been consigned to the history lessons as opposed to the modern classroom. Curious millennial technicians can, of course, attend a few history lessons in order to discover why we still use some old techniques such as interlaced frames to fool our eyes and save more and more expensive bandwidth.

It is admirable that the organisers of the IBC recognise and welcome this development, and as an illustration of their support, they introduced this year, for the first time, the IBC Young Pioneer Award as one of their future regular categories. The aim of this award is to acknowledge the welcome entry of a new wave of bright industry talent. The IBC’s intention is to award a young professional who has made a real impact with their passion, ambition and commitment and is making an outstanding contribution to our industry. The winner of the first Young Pioneer Award was Vera Bichler, a graduate of the Broadcast Academy, and the first female director of football programmes for ORF in Austria. Congratulations to Vera! “What we were looking for from the candidates was, most importantly, real talent, an outstanding individual making a real difference in the industry,” said David Levine, VP, Programming – Kids, Europe and Africa/UK & Ireland, The Walt Disney Co. Ltd and chair of the judging panel. “But we were also looking for a lasting legacy, for the Young Pioneer to be a leader today and a media guru of the future.”

“IBC 2019 was a non-stop round of networking, fruitful meetings, late night discussions, interesting product launches and valuable conference sessions”

The presence of young blood was clearly visible at this year’s exhibition and perfectly illustrated by Karel Votroubek (30 something), Commercial Director, Provys, who brought his young army of professionals with him to the show. As Karel observed: “IBC 2019 was a non-stop round of networking, fruitful meetings, late night discussions, interesting product launches and valuable conference sessions facilitating the learning and sharing of ideas with the considerable number of movers and shakers present at the show. 2019 also gave us an increase in the number of top broadcasting executives that we met. This year, we introduced four new keenly anticipated products offering more independence to broadcasters, based on a standard essential platform which can later be expanded and customised, as required. The new members of our portfolio are: Provys Everywhere which provides an extendable workflow management basis for broadcast operations; Provys Traffic Drive which offers all traffic functions in one integrated package; Provys Network Pilot which allows central management of multi-national linear operations allowing individual features in each country, and Provys OnDemand Bridge which delivers VOD workflow automation.” And so, with young blood increasingly at the helm, we can be a little more optimistic for the future, and look forward to their influence charting new courses through the stormy waters and challenging developments of the media and entertainment industry.

Broadcast Technology Reigns in Spain

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” Do not worry, we are not going to teach you the correct way to pronounce the diphthong “ai:” or “ei”. Actually, there are better topics about Spain to open a sparkling conversation in the high society of the television industry. For broadcast engineers and consultants, Madrid and Barcelona, the principal administrative and cultural cities of Spain, belong to the most enjoyable places in Europe to work (see the picture of the Palace of Communications, Madrid). It is no coincidence that AMC Networks International Southern Europe (AMCNISE) have their main offices in these two superb locations.

New York-based AMC Networks owns and operates several of the most popular and award-winning brands in television and film, including the cable networks AMC, BBC AMERICA (through a joint venture with BBC Studios), IFC, SundanceTV and WE tv, as well as premium streaming video services Sundance Now, Shudder, Acorn TV, UMC and AMC Premiere. Its holdings also include independent film production and distribution division, IFC Films, television production and worldwide content distribution division, AMC Studios, and international programming business, AMC Networks International.

Their operations in Spain are channeled through AMC Networks International Southern Europe, a Madrid and Barcelona-based television company running HD and UHD channels in Spain, Portugal, and France. They produce and distribute thematic television channels for these markets, designed for all types of audiences: cinema and series (AMC, Canal Hollywood, Sundance TV, XTRM, Somos, Dark, and Blast); factual (Odisea, Historia, Crimen+Investigación, and Blaze); lifestyle (Canal Cocina and Canal Decasa); music (Sol Musica); and children’s (Canal Panda and Biggs). They have also recently launched Planet Horror, the first and only direct-to-consumer service of horror films in Spain, in partnership with RedRum.

In 2017, AMCNISE decided to upgrade its broadcast management software and opened a tender inviting bids from several vendors in the market. The final decision on implementing Provys solutions was supported by the advanced functionalities of their applications, their flexibility and their full support on complying with the “end-to-end” needs of AMCNISE’s processes. A local implementation partner, Datos Media Technologies, was also selected to provide on-site project support and expertise.

“AMCNISE’s vibrant and growing business requires advanced technology solutions, and in this new era, it’s important for all broadcasters to upgrade to the latest management software,” says Jan Fiser, Main Consultant for AMCNISE at Provys. “In addition to providing a first-class scheduling system, we are also supplying a powerful control tool which allows AMCNISE to track their end-to-end broadcast operations. Special thanks must be given to Jose Nabais, CTO at AMCNISE, who with his team gave invaluable support to the implementation of the project.”

“AMCNISE’s vibrant and growing business requires advanced technology solutions, and in this new era, it’s important for all broadcasters to upgrade to the latest management software”

The technical requirements demanded first-class integration of Provys with Tedial, a respected MAM solution, in particular, non-stop communication regarding the preparation of content for delivery, including requesting, confirming, quality control and positioning for playout. Further integration for playout was required with Marina, a renowned playout automation solution from Pebble Beach Systems which is also to facilitate 4K (UHD) delivery. A further technical challenge for Provys in this multichannel organisation was the configuration of user access rights to ensure confidentiality within each programme group. “Implementing an enterprise broadcast management solution in such a complex organisation as AMCNISE is a huge and demanding professional task, for which, we did not need that infamous ‘Little Bit of Luck’. On completion, the whole project was a sheer delight for the Provys team” added Jan Fiser, Main Consultant and Famous Dancer, who then ‘Could Have Danced All Night’. Wouldn’t It Have Been Loverly?

References:
My Fair Lady, a famous English musical, soundtrack:

• Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?
• With a Little Bit of Luck
• Rain in Spain
• I Could Have Danced All Night