As part of the launch of its new Bollywood channel, leading Middle East free-to-air broadcaster MBC needed to speed up the branding of large quantities of promos and other marketing material. The solution came in Pixel OnDemand, the unique technical and business solution from Pixel Power.
Pixel OnDemand is aimed at broadcasters who need high performance workflows with uncompromised graphics quality in a file-based workflow. It runs on IT industry standard servers, using Pixel Power’s market-leading graphics engines and Gallium workflow management software. It allows standard templates to be defined which are then automatically populated, creating imaginative and attractive promos which are rendered and delivered for transmission quickly and without individual attention.
Pixel OnDemand is offered as a software service, on a pay-as-you-go licence, and this enabled MBC to set the system up extremely quickly as a trial to evaluate its performance. For the MBC Bollywood channel, the first promos were on air just two weeks from the date of order, in November 2013. That included support from Pixel Power’s creative services team to build the templates to MBC’s graphics standards.
“We needed something fast that could handle the volume of deliverables required for the launch of our new channel, MBC Bollywood, “ said Keith Dallison, Post Production Manager at MBC Group. “Pixel Power was incredibly responsive and delivered the exact solution we needed. An almost 50% reduction on previous production time in edit suites meant the results were beyond our expectations and so we swiftly took the decision to extend the facilities to other channels in our network.”
While for the MBC Bollywood implementation the broadcaster elected to use the opex business model of Pixel OnDemand, when it extended the system for other channels it migrated to the capex model of Pixel Power’s Pixel Factory: the same technology and functionality but with an outright sale of the software licences. This second phase went live in January 2014.
“There are two big messages coming out of this work with MBC Group,” said James Gilbert, CEO of Pixel Power. “First, that the production of really sophisticated promos can be automated, which is a big boost for productivity in big, multi-channel operations.
“Second, we can move extremely quickly to get a broadcaster on air with this technology – just two weeks in this case,” he added. “And by providing both an opex and a capex business model for the same functionality, we can meet the commercial case of any of our customers.”
