Bolivia's SportsTV Rights simplifies graphics production and cuts costs in half with Flowics.
By Flowics
LQ SportsTV Rights is a Bolivian company that acquires, manages and markets the television rights of various sports in South America and produces and distributes the associated broadcasts. Since 2013, it produces and distributes all football matches of the Bolivian Professional Division.
It does the same with other events, such as the South American Qualifiers to the FIFA World Cup, Copa America 2015 and 2019, and South American Under 20 and Under 17. Last year the company acquired the universal television rights of the Bolivian National Basketball League for four seasons (2021 to 2024), with the challenge of promoting the sport and making it grow.
SportsTV Rights produced the first high-definition broadcast in Bolivian territory and is always looking for innovative ways to meet high industry standards for television productions.
The company wanted a faster, more flexible and more efficient way to create data-driven on-screen charts without relying on external workflows or IT support and without being limited in scope or restricted by location. The company's previous broadcast graphics system was built on inflexible local hardware that limited producers to the same unalterable set of graphics, regardless of the event or what happened on the screen. Producers couldn't customize the charts by event or make changes on the fly. And SportsTV Rights had to pay a graphics provider every time it needed new graphics or wanted to tweak existing graphics, an expensive and time-consuming process.
"We wanted the autonomy to be able to generate our own graphics and do it from anywhere for any event or circumstance in seconds," said Jose Maria Quiroga, general manager of SportsTV Rights. "Without that autonomy, we were stuck with higher costs, more effort and wait times for implementation."
With that in mind, SportsTV Rights went in search of a new data-driven graphics solution. The solution had to allow graphics teams to easily generate custom graphics for each TV production, without limitations and at no additional cost for new or modified graphics. The company also wanted the agility of a cloud platform and the potential to interact with consumers through social media.
To replace its expensive and restrictive streaming graphics workflow, SportsTV Rights chose the Flowics Graphics platform to power remote and studio production of live graphics and interactive content. Of all the solutions that SportsTV Rights considered, Flowics was the one that made it possible to customize productions and integrate value-added services, such as live statistics, all at a reasonable cost and with seamless and easy-to-use integration for operators.
The fully cloud-based Flowics Graphics platform fits perfectly into SportsTV Rights' existing production flows, giving producers an agile, customized, and flexible tool to create stream-quality graphics with 24/7 support.
With Flowics, SportsTV Rights was able to adapt the same graphics package to different tournaments quickly and easily. Unlike the company's previous on-premises graphics solution, Flowics Graphics operates in the cloud, giving SportsTV Rights more flexibility in its production workflows. Any changes to graphics packages created with Flowics are easier and faster to implement, which translates into lower costs for creative services.
Importantly, through the Flowics Graphics Stats Perform data connector, a live integration with Stats Perform SDAPI, SportsTV Rights can automatically populate its live graphics with up-to-the-minute football statistics. While there is a wide range of sports statistics available, sports broadcast producers like SportsTV Rights end up using only a small fraction due to the complexity of certain sources and the effort it takes to produce broadcast graphics. Flowics solves this problem by integrating directly with Stats Perform.
SportsTV Rights uses Flowics Graphics and the Stats Perform data connector to integrate live game information and statistics into all of its live productions. For example, Flowics tools power graphics during live broadcasts of the 2022 World Cup Qualifiers on Tigo Sports and other pay-TV channels in Bolivia and when broadcasting Bolivian professional football league matches, also on Tigo Sports Bolivia.
In this implementation, SportsTV Rights receives match streams and takes them to vMix, where producers also upload Flowics Graphics as a new source. At the same time, a connected Stream Deck hub serves as a manual remote control to activate Flowics graphics. The operator, through remote control and in coordination with the transmission director, launches the graphics during the match based on different things happening in the game. Through vMix, the operator performs camera cuts on multiple input sources of all cameras in the vMix site. During the broadcast, the operator uses Flowics tools to attach graphics to pre-match highlights and insert pre- and post-match interviews with coaches and players.
Today, SportsTV Rights graphics teams have the autonomy to manage custom graphics quickly for each broadcast through an easy-to-use tool and without relying on third parties. Because SportsTV Rights has been able to optimize resources using Flowics Graphics, the company has seen a nearly 50% reduction in graphics costs.
In addition, Flowics Graphics allows SportsTV Rights to incorporate audience engagement and social media reactions into its broadcasts. The Bolivian market is just beginning to combine social media with television programming. With Flowics Graphics in place, SportsTV Rights is prepared for that interaction and the potential growth that comes with it.
"We were looking for a more flexible graphics production workflow with a faster response time, and that's just what we got with Flowics Graphics. In addition to providing a flexible and cost-effective solution that meets all of our technical and artistic needs, Flowics gives us the tools to create new brand and monetizable segments, such as our 'Man of the Match' surveys, which open up new opportunities to increase advertising inventory in the future," said Maria Quiroga. "Also, knowing that we can get support from Flowics 24 hours a day gives us confidence and peace of mind that our broadcasts and live streams will always run smoothly."
SportsTV Rights and Flowics have a three-year contract.
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