MIAMI—For more than a decade, Telemundo has been a leader in providing original Spanish-language content for direct-to-consumer platforms, delivering more than 14,000 hours of original content to streaming partners last year alone. Additionally, our sports brand, Telemundo Deportes, is the designated home for Spanish-language coverage of the world’s most popular sporting events.
Given Telemundo’s global presence and its three distinct brands for sports, entertainment (Telemundo), and news (Noticias Telemundo), it’s become imperative in the last few years for everyone—from graphic artists to producers and production assistants—to have complete access to our graphics database. There, they must be able to fully customize templates, execute segments quickly and efficiently, and integrate data for use on social media. For the last two years, Flowics, which is part of the Vizrt Group, has provided these capabilities and more.
Customization in the Cloud
Before choosing Flowics, Telemundo was planning to switch to a more flexible product that would allow us to maintain cohesive graphics packages across our software applications. Unfortunately, while the product we had used before managed to keep our third-party and post-production packets the same, it could never do so with our social media packets. Additionally, we needed better data integration for live stats for sports.
Flowics Graphics easily achieved this—for one, the customization options enabled us to literally copy and paste templates from one third-party software to another without errors. The data integration was also more fluent and quicker, allowing us to link our social media accounts directly to the platform. Stats data did not have to be linked to social media, either— the data could be integrated with third-party companies by feeding them our templates directly from the cloud.
Using Flowics Graphics in this way, we significantly cut down on the length of time to prepare graphics. The platform reduced errors because the data integrated bypassed human intervention in the middle. It also improved broadcast quality because we now have a lot of more data available than what we could do manually.
For example, we’ve used the Flowics platform in our coverage of the Premier League, the Mexican League, the Olympics, and the FIFA World Cup. For the World Cup in particular, we use Flowics Graphics in both original and special programming, like the Women’s World Cup for under 17 and under 20. With other platforms, it used to take us months to design and integrate data for our FIFA coverage. With Flowics, we can do it in less than five days.
Segments From Anywhere
Because Flowics Graphics gives every producer an individual account to set up and execute segments in the cloud, the platform provides everything the team needs from anywhere in the world.
This function became critical when I got Covid in the middle of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics last year. Fortunately it was mild but I did have to stay home, but in just 2-3 days, I was able to run a whole social media segment from my house with just my computer, which was connected through the phone with the line producer. With any other platform, this process would have been far more complicated for me and the other team members working remotely.
Overall, Flowics Graphics has given my team the flexibility to create from anywhere with full customization, data integration, and efficiency of execution. We are also impressed with the service—Flowics is always just one phone call or email away, and they respond super quickly to all our needs. We are grateful for their help in making Telemundo a recognized superpower within broadcast.
For more information, visit www.flowics.com.
