Our news feed
MyTravel Case Study
As one of the biggest leisure companies in the world, MyTravel is not an organization you would immediately think of as one of the world’s most innovative broadcasters. And yet at MyTravel’s Manchester headquarters you will find a television operation, designed and built to meet specific business needs and to generate revenue in a cost efficient manner, which puts into practice principles of digital production, media asset management and integrated workflow that many broadcasters are still only dreaming about.
Launched in February 2003, it’s an escapist’s dream: detailed descriptions of alluring holiday destinations, sandy beaches, luxury hotels, and fascinating tour itineraries; and all accompanied by detailed pricing, availability and contact information. At regular intervals throughout the day live shows feature late-availability offers, and twice a day holiday packages are auctioned live. The rest of the day is filled with destination-focused or lifestyle-themed travel offers to suit a wide range of holiday-makers. It’s hard to watch it for any length of time without going off to pack a suitcase.
If it looks and feels more like a continuous news channel than “telly selly,” that’s not surprising, because it uses newsroom-style methods as part of a close alignment between business aims and state-of-the-art broadcast technology. This delivers to Going Places a number of major benefits:
- A compelling showcase for its holiday offerings
- The ability to provide completely up to date and accurate information about those holidays
- The flexibility to make last-minute changes to every element of the broadcasts
- A mechanism to allow consumers to make informed and spontaneous buying decisions
- Rapid and effective response to the ever-changing market conditions of the travel industry
- A platform to create new and innovative offerings to the public
Know-how, systems, and “glue” from IBIS have been significant factors in creating an end-to-end solution for Going Places TV using the award winning LiveTx system.
IBIS became involved with the project at an early stage. Head of Operations Alan Purcell had originally been looking for ways of enriching the MyTravel website, but it dawned on him that the process of assembling and managing the necessary media could well be the basis for a new kind of selling mechanism based on a TV model. Coming from a publishing background he had a clear vision of what he wanted in business terms. “The Leisure Travel industry is in a constant state of flux, and MyTravel endeavours to pass on the best deal to the end consumer whilst maintaining a competitive advantage. Using newsroom values allowed us to capitalise on this change and react to market conditions as they develop, whilst delivering real-time information allows the viewer to make a better, more informed opinion on the type of product they wished to buy. IBIS clearly understood this, which made the selection process an easy one. When I required broadcast consultancy and development expertise, IBIS delivered - both the required technology and progression of my original concept.”
As you would expect, MyTravel has a considerable range of information and business systems, including a very large live holiday bookings database and a world-class CRM tool, allowing dynamic user profiling and collaborative filtering of vast amounts of company data. Its channels to market include stores, call centres, teletext and the internet.
The TV concept builds on, and integrates with, these foundations. At its heart is a daily schedule, which is built up of individual programme items along with branding material such as idents, stings, promotions, and interstitials. Each hourly or half-hourly segment of the schedule is themed: it might concentrate on parts of the world, such as Spain or the Caribbean; on individual hotels; on specialist holidays such as cruises, activity holidays or city breaks; or on special offers. There are also daily live auctions with viewers bidding for holiday packages by phone, the website or their interactive TV service. Some segments are made up of entirely pre-recorded items, while some are linked live from the studio.
The schedule’s basic building blocks are video packages, but these packages are themselves just one part of an “offer” which combines key business data, such as country, region, resort, hotel, options, airports, dates, prices, with associated media and metadata elements (video, text, graphical material). What goes into the schedule is driven directly by marketing requirements. In addition to promoting the broad ranges of holidays available, schedulers can respond very quickly to specific business needs, for example to highlight particular offers with short lead times.
The transmission process merges the packages with information from a variety of sources and databases to create a fully live on-screen display. This combines studio or pre-recorded presentation, video packages, and various items of textual data: descriptions of the current item, the status of special offers and auctions, and of course the all-important contact details. Viewers can respond quickly and efficiently to buy or bid online or through a call-centre.
What makes the Going Places TV system so special is the extraordinary degree of integration between marketing requirements, the production process, the transmission schedule and the trading mechanisms. Equally remarkable is the way the various systems involved combine to assemble media and data “on the fly” to simplify the process and to provide an extremely efficient and flexible response to business requirements. While the programme material and its associated data and metadata are very largely prepared in advance, the delivery of it, although fully automated, is completely “live” with the automation system controlling the retrieval, formatting and transmission of video, audio, graphics and data in real time.
How does it work? And where do the IBIS LiveTx components contribute? The best way to explore this is to look in detail at each stage of the process: Scheduling, Ingest, Logging, Editing, Production, Graphics, Transmission, and Archiving.
LiveTx Scheduling
The Going Places TV process really begins when “offers” and other items are created within the IBIS Channel Management (ICM) application. Each 24-hour transmission day has a separate presentation schedule, which is initially created using a template that sets the style and basic structure.
A scheduler builds the daily schedule out of items which have gone, are going or will go through the production process, since the initial creation can begin a long time in advance of transmission. In fact the schedule may start out containing items which do not yet exist except as schedule items with an internal code or “house number.” This number is crucial, since is used to identify a schedule item at every stage of the planning, production and transmission process.
The Going Places TV schedule includes offer packages, promotional and other interstitial items (stings, idents and so on) created in-house using a variety of compositing and editing systems; and live studio events. The text metadata for screen display is added to programme items as and when required.
Some pre-produced programmes have all of the text and graphical material, as well as effects, applied in advance during the production process, but most are assembled and played out live. Idents and promotions are scheduled to fill any gaps, and to complete the schedule current pricing information is sourced and retrieved from the main MyTravel database and entered against each of the “offers”.
As the production of scheduled items is completed, updated information such as duration and status are “pulled through” into the PreCue transmission schedule, and at the appropriate time it is downloaded to the IBIS Transmission Automation (ITA) system.
LiveTx Ingest
In the run-up to launch, MyTravel sent a small army of camera crews to all of its regular destinations. This “reporting” operation created a large archive of stock footage (which is constantly being added to) covering individual resorts, hotels, attractions, activities, customer interviews, and lots more. Material from camera tapes is ingested at high resolution onto a GVG Profile video server (there are two, one for production and one for transmission), and in parallel at low resolution (using IPV Spectreview) onto a browse server. The ingest is done using the IBIS ServerLoad application, either by marking in and out points on the tape for a bulk ingest, or by putting the server into continuous record and loading material for later segmentation.
Going Places TV also holds a stills library of some 60,000 items, which can be called up and injected into edits.
LiveTx Logging and Editing
Newly ingested material is viewed in low resolution using IBIS Vista View, and clips can be assembled into rough-cut edits using IBIS ClipTrim. An EDL is then passed to the on-line system where GVG NewsEdit craft editing systems are used to create finished material. Completed edits (or new material originated on the NewsEdit systems without a preceding rough-cut) are sent to the production Profile when finished, from where the IBIS ServerMirror Scavenge application dubs it into the browse server automatically.
LiveTx Production
The edited packages go through a production process which associates them with the various data and metadata elements which make up the rest of the “offer.”
IBIS ClipTrim integrates with the Grass Valley editors and servers, allowing production and scheduling staff to work with frame-accurate MPEG1 versions of the finished packages.
A key production task is the addition of what are called “Points of Interest” to the finished material. These are really cue points, to indicate precisely where and when during the package’s playout additional captioning or other events added live in transmission will occur. There are several different types of Points of Interest, depending on the type of clip being played out. They can denote such events as the beginning and end of various effects, the cue-point for associated page of text, the start of end credits, or the entry point for a new banner and the point to remove it.
IBIS Vista is used to browse the low-res media, and Points of Interest are logged into PreCue. Marking a Point of Interest automatically registers the appropriate timecode and type of Point of Interest in the PreCue database. This ensures that whenever the clip is scheduled, all Point of Interest information is passed to the ITA system for intelligent use live on air.
When Points of Interest have been added to a clip, it can then be associated with a particular “offer” and the appropriate metadata text added. This is done directly into PreCue, using a series of displayed text boxes. On transmission, display of the text boxes is triggered automatically at the registered Point of Interest.
LiveTx Graphics
The on-screen data displays are a crucial part of the process, and use the capabilities of the PubliTronic Delta, a graphics device which offers a powerful way of combining and inserting video, audio, graphics and text into a live broadcast. Delta allows text and graphical elements to be inserted into a variety of “templates” in which font, colour, position and a wealth of effects can be pre-determined and into which data can be inserted live on cue or at a Point of Interest logged in PreCue.
Some form of graphical information is on the screen nearly all the time, with the most common being a compound lower-third display with three elements: branding and contact details, which stays mostly static; a “top bid” section which scrolls horizontally across the screen showing bid status on current auctions, and a “latest” section which displays current bargain offers or auction status and scrolls to reveal new offers several times a minute.
Another kind of template shows details of an individual offer or property. It is shown on the left hand side of the screen.
Yet another kind of template is a “coming up” screen used to show viewers the next items in the daily schedule.
In all of these pre-formatted graphics displays, the data element is part of the metadata stored with the “offer”. Under the control of the ITA system, the Delta creates and displays the templates, populates them with appropriate data from PreCue, and makes them available for transmission, all completely on the fly. There is no separate running order to be created, managed or manipulated.
LiveTx Transmission
At an appropriate time, PreCue downloads the schedule to two separate ITA systems (doubled up for purposes of resilience) which take charge of transmission. ITA transmits the schedule as provided from PreCue, co-ordinating the playout of video using IBIS ServerPlay, of the various on-screen graphical elements from Delta and elsewhere, and of all other on-air devices.
ITA automatically transfers material from the production Profile to the transmission Profile by fibre-channel, based on the requirements of the schedule.
The Going Places TV MCR, from where the channel is transmitted, is remarkably uncluttered.
LiveTx Archiving
Long-term high resolution storage is on a DVD jukebox system with a capacity of 9 Terabytes. IBIS applications manage the flow and management of media between this system, the low resolution browse archive, and the production environment.
Material to be archived (either manually tagged or meeting defined rules) is automatically copied to the archive as and when it becomes available, and can be searched via the ServerBase database and viewed in low resolution at the desktop using VistaView or ClipTrim.
Material required on the main server is marked for transfer and moved back by ITA. If an ITA playlist contains material that is located in the archive and not on the server, it is automatically transferred back to the server system.
Integration
Since smooth integration between databases, particularly with existing external databases, is such an important element in the overall Going Places TV system, IBIS paid particular attention to defining and developing the appropriate interfaces.
Two crucial “offer” elements come in from MyTravel’s live bookings database, which serves all of their high street outlets and their web operation: Pricing, which is linked not to a clip but to an “offer” and which needs constant checking to make sure the most competitive deals are offered; and Late items, which must be rapidly linked with both media and data sources so that accurate real-time information can be displayed on screen. Live Auctions are handled by the MyTravel call centre database, and bids must be rapidly updated so that they can be displayed on screen in real time.
On Time, On Budget
These database integration elements were among the few things that demanded custom work from IBIS for MyTravel. The only other bespoke items were a driver for the PubliTronic Delta, and some enhancements to the Point of Interest functionality to allow automation events to be scheduled during running broadcast items.
Otherwise the entire end-to-end workflow has been enabled using a variety of standard IBIS products under the LiveTx umbrella, including:
- ITA: Automation, archive administration
- PreCue: Scheduling, channel management
- ServerSuite: ingest, content management, server control
- Vista: Low-res acquisition, browsing, editing, POI entry
So how does it all work? In operational terms, extremely well. The launch was trouble-free, and the operation has been virtually faultless since then. IBIS says that the availability of “off the shelf” products meeting practically all of Going Places TV’s requirements was one reason why the system was delivered “on time, on budget.”
IBIS’s Marketing Director Andrew Winter says: “In a world where systems don’t always work as you want, when you want, we are happy to report that the Going Places TV system was accepted and signed off, as it went on air.”
In business terms, it is perhaps too soon to tell. But so far, so good: just a few weeks after launch, the station was attracting plenty of viewers and buyers, with the number of packages sold through the channel in line with expectations.
Overall, Alan Purcell is very happy with progress so far, although he has many ambitions for further development both of the business and of the systems serving it. For instance, he thinks the assets held in the system can be resold, since the massive pre-launch ENG effort has created a library of holiday destination clips and stills that is probably the most comprehensive anywhere. He is still interested in using those assets himself to enrich the MyTravel.com website. MyTravel is watching the growth of broadband with interest. And he sees equally interesting possibilities in Video On Demand.
As far as the system itself is concerned, there is now some work to be carried out in Phase Two of the project, such as the implementation of a “red dot” interactive capability, allowing the users to browse through Going Places’ database of holidays; and in general terms he would like the system, in its next development stage, not only allowing schedulers to respond to demand and load factors, but to enable those factors to drive the scheduling process directly.
From IBIS’s point of view, Going Places TV has also been a big success and one which has taught them a lot about how to build reactive “live” systems with sufficient underlying asset management capability to integrate volatile and changing information with broadcast media at the point of transmission.
“Which, when you think about it,” says Andrew Winter, “is exactly what newsrooms do.”
The processes of acquisition, logging, browsing, editing, scheduling, transmission and archiving are very familiar to every news broadcaster. But few if any of them carry out those processes in as integrated a way at Going Places, and even fewer can fully automate the blend of media elements with live on-screen information.
And hardly any could produce and transmit what is in effect a live, non-stop 24-hour show with a newsroom staff of 9: 2 producers, 2 researchers, 2 editors and 3 schedulers. There is also a small control-room team that is present when live shows are done, but at most times of the day (and almost always at night and at weekends) the schedule goes to air unattended, with ITA in charge and all of the elements that would normally require graphics operators, vision mixers, directors and other staff to create and transmit being done automatically…but with live information.
This is the key to what IBIS and their partners have achieved at Going Places TV: accurate, informative and up-to-date factual broadcasting, produced with great efficiency, optimum use of resources, a high degree of reliability, and all in complete alignment with the business aims of the broadcaster.
Now that’s an “offer” that ought to be hard to refuse...