Background

The competition for viewership between the major broadcast networks is fierce.  As television audiences start to decline due to the internet, Networks continually shift and move their television shows to fight for the coveted Nielsen rating.  The base lineup of the Prime Time schedule is the foundation for the ABC Network Ad Sales organization to sell advertising space.  This lineup is announced collectively for all broadcast networks at the annual upfront events at Ad Week in New York.

In the television industry, an upfront is a gathering at the start of important advertising sales periods, held by television network executives and attended by major advertisers and the media.  Each major television network previews their upcoming fall and mid-season series for advertisers, the press, and the other networks.  Annual upfronts for TV generally occurs in early May.

The Project

This first phase of this effort was the development and implementation of a strategic Planning and Scheduling tool for ABC Network that facilitated the creation of the Prime Time lineup.  Prime time is the block of broadcast programming which takes place during the middle of the evening for television programming between (Eastern and Pacific Time) (7 p.m. to 10 p.m. or 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) respectively.  The initial module was called Wall-E (Walt’s ABC Lineup Loader – Entertainment class).

The second phase of the project was the development and implementation of a day to day operational tool to manage the 52 week ABC Network programming schedule.  This module was called EVE (Evaluate, Verify & Ensconce) which streamlines and automates the day to day scheduling and work flows between ABC Programming/Scheduling and the Current/Alternative Production business units.

The Next Generation Reporting & Data (NGRD) project is a major initiative to build and establish an enterprise-scale reporting and data platform for all of Disney ABC Television.

The phased approach will ultimately migrate current reporting systems onto the Amazon Web Services platform as well as create one unified reporting portal for the company.

We will create a hybrid, cloud-based (AWS) and on-premise reporting/data platform that consolidates current reporting portals into a single flexible, extensible portal that enables back-end data sources to easily connect with front end reporting tools such as Microsoft SSRS, Power BI and Tableau.

Credits, Consolidation, Composition, Planning & Organization (C3PO) will streamline work flows between post production business units as well as centralize the episodic television credits into a single source system.

Users will be able to utilize the system for managing show credits, automatically create “end credits” and output “end credits” into video and/or single images for post production facilities.