Press Association Sport - VidiGo Graphics
Working The Wire
By Neil Chambers
Located in the UK, Press Association Sport (PAS) is a leading sports data supplier, providing dedicated coverage for morre than 40 major sports worldwide. Our sports wire service delivers a round-the-clock breaking news feed, while our comprehensive sports data feeds, editorial and page-ready services to clients around the world. We deliver sport-broadcasting services such as live scores and results updates that enable our customers to keep viewers and listners on top of the latest sporting developments.
Our sports broadcasting data is available for use in various formats, such as on-screen ticker feeds, straight-to-air text pages, live sports broadcast graphics, or a simple printout for a newsreader.
PAS supplies data-driven screen-ready graphics, providing a visual element to our sports broadcasting content. Our data drives the football broadcast graphics on televised English Premier League matches, which are seen in more than 160 countries worldwide.
Our broadcast services group focuses on delivering cost-efficient and user-friendly solutions, allowing the delivery of data and editorially rich graphics to air with minimal manual input. This involves the ingestion of XML feeds into a UI before integration with a graphics generator ready to go to air.
Because the final piece of the jigsaw - graphics integration - had become complex and relied on specialised skill-sets and was relatively expensive, we needed to improve this part of our workflow.
We became aware of VigiGo Graphics via Boxer System, a UK reseller of broadcast equipment. Using Flash, VidiGo Graphics easily creates, operates, and controls live broadcast graphics. We chose VidiGo Graphics because the Flash concept was of keen interest to us since it is easy to connect to external sources, such as RSS, databases, and the internet. There is no vendor lock when creating graphics, so the system is 100 percent open. Skilled Flash developers can be hired easily to design and program broadcast graphics. Our graphics integration is much simpler. The development requirements can now be spread over a larger staff base and critically at a much lower cost base without any loss of quality. VidiGo's customer care and technical support were excellent, and we were able to benefit from VidiGo Graphics from the very beginning.
VidiGo Graphics is currently the world's only proven solution that enable Adobe Flash to be used as graphical overlay in the broadcast industry. We have tested this software product thoroughly and whilst traditional broadcast graphic systems are complex and costly, VidiGo's innovative set-up makes it extremely easy to create, operate, and control SD and HD broadcast graphics. This is really amazing.
Neil Chambers is Head of Broadcast Services at Press Association Sport.