SintecMedia has released a new version of OnAir, its flexible management solution for media companies of all sizes. Included in the upgrade are new tools for graphical analysis and controlling processes that help broadcasters maximize revenues and reduce the time-consuming reporting responsibilities dictated by Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.
"Especially in today's business climate, careful attention and significant effort must be invested to ensure that government regulations are being met at all times. Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and other rules have placed new burdens on broadcasters that can draw resources away from the generation of revenue," said Dan Yuval, SintecMedia's vice president of marketing. "Our OnAir operations-management solution takes on much of that burgeoning regulatory responsibility and helps managers analyze the success of airtime sales programs. The upgrades in this new version of OnAir provide even more powerful, more flexible tools for streamlining operations across the entire organization."
Among OnAir's bevy of new features is a state-of-the-art graphical analysis tool that can create real-time reports on a variety of programming and business activities. Using simple commands, managers can view tables of live data and then create polished, professional-looking graphs from them with a single button-click. Results can be filtered, sorted, grouped, and subdivided interactively, so users can quickly generate different views on a given set of data.
For example, a revenue analysis may start at a high level, utilizing a pie graph to break down a station's advertising revenue by industry. Clicking on a particular industry reveals a table detailing all advertisers within that industry and their ad sales as a dollar figure or percentage of all sales within that industry. One more click can convert that table into one of several kinds of graphs, or focus the analysis on a single advertiser, or change it to a different industry group. In addition to historical and projected revenue analysis, a variety of inventory reporting capabilities provide a simple means of analyzing the amount of airtime that has been sold and is still available to sell.
OnAir also helps broadcasters control their internal processes and meet the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation with enhanced security, auditing, and user-definable rules capabilities. Broadcasters can define rules within the system so that OnAir automatically checks to make sure that any ad sales or changes don't inadvertently violate the law. By assigning OnAir to conduct any combination of checks and balances, broadcasters can reduce or eliminate the burden of doing the often time-consuming work manually, freeing up personnel resources for other applications.
Managers can assign permissions to individual users down to the field level and easily report on security permissions on a user-by-user basis. They can assign any field as auditable, and OnAir will track every single change made to that field, including when the change was made and who made it. These capabilities can be used to show any changes made to invoices after they have been issued, for example.
OnAir's eTV feature gives broadcasters the ability to manage the streaming of video and data in parallel to regular events. This is a popular feature in sports broadcasts, in which a special button can access an otherwise hidden stream of real-time data that provides in-depth statistics about the players. OnAir's promotion optimization feature can assist in the creation of a promotional campaign by allowing users to choose how many promo spots to air, how much time to dedicate to them, and how many rating points they want the promo to achieve. It then provides tracking information for analyzing how well those targets have been achieved.
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