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For a fifth consecutive year, Bannister Lake Chameleon is back at the US Open aggregating a huge amount of real-time data and displaying graphics.

This year’s US Open Tennis Tournament at Flushing Meadows, NY is being driven by Bannister Lake’s cloud-based Chameleon, managing and visualizing real-time results for all the events.

Chameleon is managing thousands of tennis datasets from Sports Media Technologies IBM solutions, moderating and distributing matches and practice schedules, match results, social media, news, weather and more for the in-venue displays.

Bannister Lake working alongside Van Wagner Sports and Entertainment is delivering live updates and tournament information to digital displays throughout the facility.

“It’s been one of our largest and most complex projects”, says Alain Savoie, Bannister Lake’s Creative Director. “There are 864 players competing with 900 matches to be played over the 2-week period. Every single game needs the ability to be called up on the fly and include match data and player data.”

In addition to parsing and managing data, Chameleon is providing the event’s ticker solution. In all, 7 different ticker feeds are being generated and feeding various screens around the grounds. Signage graphics were generated from 3 Ross Video XPression systems outputting to 9 channels displaying sponsors and logo loops appearing at specific times throughout the day.

In addition to the main grounds there are another 10 XPression systems being used for traditional CGs in the Grandstand, Armstrong and Ashe Stadiums, as well as the Ashe Courtside displays powered by Ross Video’s XPression Tessera, controlled through Ross Video DashBoard. Chameleon’s tight integration with Ross Video products assures operational efficiencies and seamless performance.

Bannister Lake’s Chameleon with its powerful data engine remains the sports industry’s best choice for complex mission-critical data visualization tasks.  For more information about Chameleon, visit our website or contact us at info@bannisterlake.com

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Chameleon Support for NAAD System

Chameleon has added support for the National Alert Aggregation & Dissemination (NAAD) System. This is Canada’s national public alert system which delivers critical and potentially life-saving alerts to Canadians through television, radio and wireless devices.

Bannister Lake provides a parser to the TCP push feed which customers can run locally. Alerts are also made available on the Bannister Lake Community cloud service providing a RESTful api to access alerts organized into provinces and regions.

Chameleon consumes all required and optional data from the feed and includes fields for immediate wireless and broadcast messages.

Bannister Lake has also built a web widget which broadcasters can use on their websites and news broadcasts. The source code is made free of charge to all Chameleon customers.

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Bannister Lake’s Chameleon joins Grass Valley Media Universe Alliance

Bannister Lake - Grass Valley GVMU

Bannister Lake Chameleon connects with Grass Valley’s AMPP

CAMBRIDGE, ON, Canada, May 11, 2022 – Bannister Lake, a leading provider of broadcast data aggregation and graphics solutions, today announced it has become a member of the Grass Valley Media Universe (GVMU) Alliance. As a GVMU Alliance member, Bannister Lake’s Chameleon platform will connect with Grass Valley’s Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP) and become an integrated part of a cloud-enhanced architecture.

The GV Media Universe brings solutions together with existing workflows and equipment to create and distribute premium live content while reducing complexity and cost for those who adopt GVMU into their work environment, Grass Valley said.

The underlying technology is designed with cloud-based live production needs in mind. It is frame-accurate, responsive and compatible with connected control surfaces and applications that take full advantage of what the cloud offers, the company said.

Developed to integrate into any production workflow, Bannister Lake Chameleon enables the creation of graphic overlays, tickers and branding for all kinds of broadcast productions and verticals, including live sports, betting, elections, esports, news, government and corporate events. The Chameleon solution provides a comprehensive set of design tools and easily scales to support multiple channels. It can be integrated with AMPP-supported production switching, master control and other production tools, paving the way to quick and seamless live production, Grass Valley said.

With confirmation of Chameleon’s compliance with GV AMPP, both companies will work together under the alliance to make sure the graphics solution integrates seamlessly the GV Media Universe.

“Chameleon brings a sophisticated tool to the GV Media Universe with our ability to contain any data from unlimited data sources. Our HTML5 CG/renderer and NDI™ support provides easy integration for customers. We are excited by the opportunity to participate with this important initiative.” said Bannister Lake’s president and founder Georg Hentsch.

For more information about GrassValley, visit grassvalley.com  For more information about Chameleon and other Bannister Lake solutions, please visit bannisterlake.com. 

About Bannister Lake Inc. 

Bannister Lake is a leading provider of professional video graphic display solutions for broadcast, cable, satellite, audio/visual and information presentation applications worldwide. Our solutions integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure while automating the integration and display of external data sources, improving the productivity of your organization. Visit us online at bannisterlake.com.

About Grass Valley

We love live! Grass Valley is the leading technology provider for the live media and entertainment market. We work with 90% of the world’s major media brands, powering their media centers, mobile production units, 24-hour newsrooms, and sports streaming platforms. As the number one trusted partner in media technology, we enable content owners and service providers to create and deliver compelling live experiences in the most efficient way.

Whether it’s IP-native cameras or state-of-the-art cloud production platforms, we’re at the forefront of groundbreaking live media innovation. We continue to pioneer market-leading advances based on cloud and software efficiency to transform live content for the streaming era today and in the future.

Headquartered in Montreal, Grass Valley has been engaged in the media technology business for over 60 years. grassvalley.com.

Bannister Lake: D’Arcy Pickering – VP Sales

sales@bannisterlake.com

Grass Valley: Chris Merrill – Director Strategic Marketing

Chris.Merrill@grassvalley.com

Bannister-Lake_Grass-Valley-GVMU-Press-ReleaseDownload

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Polls Support in Chameleon

Chameleon now offers an easy way to add polls support in Chameleon. In Chameleon’s web interface Flow, polls are a new data type:

To create a poll, it’s as simple as entering a question:

And choices:

There are options to set a start and stop time for when a poll is active, but after the poll is defined, it’s just a matter of publishing the poll and it’s ready for primetime.

Each poll has a unique id which is reflected in the url for the poll:

https://polling.bannisterlake.com/#/0313acb0-10d9-4a0f-b3a7-fd75f695124f

Once the poll is published, it’s just a matter of using the poll on a website. For example, it can be included on a web page using an iframe or embed html tag. A poll can be reused by republishing while keeping the url intact.

You can even have a QR code take you to the poll:

Polls in Chameleon have full support from players and Chameleon’s restful api BLADE. Additional formatting of polls can be done by inserting html tags into poll questions and choices. And there is support for including images for questions and choices.

The implementation allows for any instance of Chameleon either on the cloud or internally to use polls. On the web-side we use the React library providing responsiveness for all platforms including phones, tablets, PCs and more. On the cloud side, our implementation is AWS’ Elastic Beanstalk and the DynamoDB providing a platform for high capacity access.

Polls come standard with all instances of Chameleon. It’s another exciting piece of the Chameleon ecosystem.

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Bannister Lake Financial Services

Bitcoin Chart

Cheddar News is a live streaming news channel. They pride themselves as the voice of what’s next with a strong emphasis on technology and finance. They’re available to watch live and on-demand across all traditional and OTT platforms.

Bannister Lake has a long history of providing data and graphics for finance broadcasting. Our finance solution aggregates financial data and display it in the form of charts, tickers, bugs, sidebars and full screen boards.

We have been providing financial services for Cheddar from their inception. Recently, we assisted Cheddar on their rebrand with exciting new graphics and advanced data.

The Bannister Lake finance solution is a client/server design allowing most of the work done remotely and even offline from the character generator. For this particular instance, Cheddar is using the Ross Video XPression CG along with the Xignite financial data feed. We’re even pushing the boundaries of XPression by using the new line object to animate charting lines.

All graphics and data are driven from the Finance Player:

Bannister Lake Financial App

It has excellent charting support including after hours, comparison and flexible intraday charts:

After Hours Chart
Bitcoin Chart

And includes a variety of full screen boards:

Cdn Banks

Sidebars can have a mix of quotes and charts:

Tickers:

And Bugs:

For information about our financial services and display solutions, contact us at info@bannisterlake.com

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UEFA European Championship

Bannister Lake is pleased to be part of the team bringing the UEFA European Championship broadcast coverage to Canada. The tournament was originally scheduled for 2020 but was rescheduled to begin today. It is being held in 11 cities in 11 UEFA countries as a celebration of the event’s 60th anniversary. The 24 teams will be vying for what is one of the premier soccer events on the planet. Portugal will be defending its 2016 win.

Bannister Lake provided both a scorebug and graphics for the Canadian broadcasts on TSN and CTV. The software included client/server architecture allowing a single operator to control unlimited concurrent games. Bannister Lake provided a custom application using the Ross Video XPression api as the CG platform.

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Bannister Lake Announces Integration with Traffic Systems using the BXF SMPTE Standard

In an effort to provide improved integration between broadcast branding and traffic systems, Bannister Lake’s Chameleon has added support for reading playlists using BXF, the SMPTE standard for data exchange in the broadcasting industry.

By reading traffic playlists directly, Chameleon provides a way to bypass automation systems for triggering secondary events like snipes and bugs. The playlist data is moved directly into Chameleon’s schedule providing tight integration with graphics and data.

To help in viewing the secondary events, Chameleon now also supports viewing segments in the schedule. This makes it easier to view the timing of assets and offers a way to safely adjust or manually add new ones.

Another new feature is to clearly mark assets which haven’t been fully defined. In this way, assets that aren’t currently in the database can be scheduled but can be clearly marked as requiring definition.

For more information on Chameleon integration with WideOrbit, contact us at mailto:info@bannisterlake.com.

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Chameleon CG – Flexible Preview Channel Among Other Things

Chameleon CG has a designer application where all graphics are created. It looks similar to a traditional CG:

But it departs traditions on the playout side. Any scene created in the Chameleon CG is published to the Chameleon database ready to be utilized as a template for branding assets or the sequencer. Triggering isn’t done by the Designer application but instead from the standard Chameleon web interface called Flow. Once a template is published, everything happens in Flow from creating assets to triggering them to the program and preview channels..

This means there isn’t anything needed to install locally to use the Chameleon CG. And there is no limit of what platform Chameleon CG supports because any platform that has a web browser supports the Chameleon CG including mobile phones, tablets, Raspberry pi, Mac, Linux, Windows,…

To aid in flexibility, any Chameleon instance can support unlimited channels. If a template is published, it has the potential to be used by multiple channels and all triggered from Flow. In fact, a single instance of Chameleon can be shared by multiple unrelated broadcasters through Chameleon’s silo mechanism, content groups; a further way to monetize a single instance of Chameleon for unrelated events, channels or broadcasters.

Rendering can happen to a browser, NDI or SDI depending on the player being utilized. Preview channels can also be defined and rendered to a browser, NDI or SDI. Furthermore, one can have a program channel render to SDI and the preview channel to a browser or the other way around. Whatever makes sense. In this example, we’re rendering both program and preview channels to a browser. The left browser window is the program channel and the right browser window is the preview channel.

This all works well for a remote production since Chameleon has been tuned for cloud support and the production team can trigger all graphics from their web browser.

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Our NAB 2009 Discovery

The 2009 NAB Show was held between April 18th and 23rd with registration down 20% to just over 80,000 attendees. The exhibitors included established names such as Adobe, Canon, JVC, Microsoft, SAT-GE, Tektronix, 3M, Altera, Cisco, Verizon and Xilinx and promising names like Qualstar, Bogen Imaging, Dayport, LEN, Trilithic and YellowBrix. Cheers and Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer received the inaugural Television Chairman’s Award.

Bannister Lake had made a decision to find another platform for developing broadcast graphics applications and used NAB 2009 as our place for discovery. Up until then, we had settled on Inscriber and the RTX api but we had concerns about using only one platform. Our focus was to find the next dev platform for our broadcast applications. There were several candidates and we did our homework prior to the show. Francis, D’Arcy and I met with all the potential partners. Some looked promising, others not so much. On the Wednesday of the show, Francis and D’Arcy stumbled on a product that wasn’t on our radar prior to the show. It was a recent acquisition by Ross Video. The company was Media Refinery and the product was XPression.

With the show nearing its close on Thursday, Francis and D’Arcy dragged me into the Ross booth and an acquaintance from our Inscriber days, Hans Bijlsma, gave us a demo of XPression. The first thing that impressed me was how quickly it installed. No reboot! I didn’t get a full appreciation of the api yet but XPression looked like it could do everything we needed graphically. I remember closing the 2009 NAB show sipping champagne in the Ross booth. Francis and I had found our new platform.

Over the coming years, we developed ticker, branding, scorebug, elections and other custom solutions using XPression. We even developed a ticker and branding solution which Ross Video started OEMing in 2013 and is still having success today. A lot has changed over the years in how we use XPression but it continues to be a successful development platform for Bannister Lake.

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Introducing Chameleon Character Generator and Sequencer Support

Chameleon customers may have noticed something new in our web interface Flow:

CG Support !

Bannister Lake is rolling out Character Generator (CG) support for Chameleon. While the Chameleon renderer has a full function Designer allowing the creation of scenes used for tickers, branding and custom applications, an easy way to create traditional CG sequencing is now available. The new CG Sequencer support is provided through Chameleon’s web interface Flow. This gives users a way to drive graphics from any browser including support over internet, intranet, cloud, streaming and OTT.

The Chameleon CG is all driven from the chameleon.api which is Bannister Lake’s api for building standalone and web-based applications on any platform. All communications happen using a tcp/ip port providing great flexibility. And all rendering happens using JavaScript on the client side providing a wider distribution of processing. The requirement for rendering on the client side is supported on any platform supporting the chromium engine from phones, tablets, Raspberry Pi, laptops, Macs, PCs, Xenix and more. This offers excellent support for remote broadcasting, streaming and traditional studio environments.

After publishing graphics from the Designer, the scenes are now available to be used on any channel. In Flow, pick the channel, scene and set the dynamic tags in the scene. Save the scene in a playlist which can be used among users in a content group and we now have a web-based, collaborative CG sequencer for Chameleon.

While the Designer will be given sequencer support going forward, the new web-based CG sequencer offers the most flexible means for providing a fully functional CG sequencer to our users.

For more information on Chameleon Character Generator and Sequencer Support contact sales@bannisterlake.com