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 against.  This lineup is announced collectively for all major broadcast networks (e.g. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) 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 television shows for advertisers, the press, and the other networks.  Annual upfronts for television generally occurs in early May.

Product Road Map

Phase I of this initiative was the development and implementation of a strategic planning tool for ABC Network that facilitated the creation of the Prime Time schedule (lineup) at the series level.  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 application is called Wall-E (Walt’s ABC Lineup Loader – Entertainment).  Its secondary goal was to enable executive management the ability to manipulate and create the Prime Time lineup with almost zero learning curve.

Phase II of the project was the development and implementation of a tactical operational tool to manage the daily television schedule for ABC Network at the episodic level.  This application was called EVE (Evaluate, Verify & Ensconce) which streamlined and automated the day to day scheduling and work flows between ABC Programming, ABC  Studios Production and ABC Talent Acquisition.

Phase III was the collection, consolidation, ingestion and data visualization of ratings and viewership data onto the EVE scheduling grid creating a “heat map”.  This would illustrate and high light viewership activity enabling strategists the ability to focus on specific shows and episodes by viewer consumption, genre or creative talent.

Background

The Next Generation Reporting & Data (NGRD) project is a major initiative to build and establish an enterprise-wide reporting and data platform for Disney General Entertainment.

Old reporting portals and tools were disparate; on antiquated technology stacks; not built in a scalable manner; required a large overhead to support and maintain.

Product Road Map

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.

Background

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

Why do we show credits at the end of movies and television shows?

Credits refer to a list of acknowledgments of those who contributed to the creation of a movie or television program. Production companies are legally obligated by the guilds (e.g. WGA, DGA, PGA, SAG, etc) to display credits. In certain circumstances there are legal contracts to the order of how their name appears (e.g. special credit at end of primary cast display) or their title (e.g. Executive Producer).

Credits were manually tracked on disparate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, eMails, post-it notes or worse in people’s memories. Credits displayed incorrectly result in financial penalties. C3PO would address these pain points.

Product Road Map

Phase I create a web portal to capture, consolidate, review and approve Credits eliminating the managing of Credits through disparate and manual methods. Web portal also allows specific access to individuals outside of the Credits Administration business unit for legal reference and audits.

Phase II automate the creation of Credits, calculating guild timings against remaining Credits time. Drastically reduce the time, expense and potential typographical errors incurred with manual creation.

Phase III develop distribution functions to generate 30 second .MOV files or single frame images of Credits for delivery to post-production video facilities.