About the customer
Viaplay is a streaming services owned by Viaplay Group. The company operates the namesake video streaming services Viaplay and Viafree, advertising-funded TV and radio channels, the V pay-TV channels, as well as the studio production company Viaplay Studios. Viaplay Group was founded in 2018 as a spinoff from MTG.
Improving Workflows
In 2015, when Viaplay decided to double down on VOD content and streamline their subscription video streaming service, their operational infrastructure was not optimized for non-linear content delivery. Lacking a centralized content management system, Viaplay’s product team needed a solution that would allow for the automation of some publication processes and increase the amount of content going through their linear and non-linear channels.
“After meeting BeBanjo, we got a good sense of what they could do for us. They were willing to take the time to understand Viaplay’s use cases, and they were also clear about the scope of the services they can offer us,”
Urban Lofbom, Viaplay’s Platform and Product Manager shared with us. “This is something we valued from the beginning: there were never any false promises made.”
Implementing the EIDR Matching System
After dialogue with the BeBanjo team, Viaplay decided to implement EIDR IDs to consolidate their content and use BeBanjo for their central content and metadata repository. “We decided not to allow any title to enter into the service unless it was EIDR matched,” Urban explained. This ultimately allowed the Viaplay teams to have a single source of truth, resulting in more efficient workflows and greater control.
EIDR, or the Entertainment Identifier Registry, is a global unique identifier system primarily for commercial audiovisual content. Each object in the Registry is assigned a unique, universal, persistent identifier, or EIDR ID. This ID can later be used to identify content assets and metadata across various content management systems, instantly improving internal asset tracking.
Viaplay implemented the EIDR IDs using BeBanjo’s API and external ID fields. This created a centralized and standardized data architecture, which later allowed Viaplay to work with both linear and non-linear scheduling systems without duplicating titles or metadata.
While this solution worked well for Viaplay, there are other ways teams working with BeBanjo can manage their content IDs. As each use case is unique, Bebanjo works with customers closely to find the data architecture that fits best their specific needs.
Team Collaboration in BeBanjo
Thanks to BeBanjo’s robust and well-documented APIs, Viaplay integrated their existing tools easily, greatly enhancing their users experience. Because their systems are able to communicate through BeBanjo efficiently, Viaplay is now able to generate entries in the Catalogue of the platform automatically, based on the rights recorded in their linear scheduling system. After the content entries have been generated, different teams take over and work on adding missing metadata and assets: defining genres; adding synopsis, images, subtitles, etc. This end to end workflow with integrated components allows Viaplay’s users to focus their time on being creative in the scheduling process, rather than getting tied down with slow and inefficient processes.
“Since everything is web-based in BeBanjo, after we made the decision to work remotely in March, it all worked out beautifully.”
Viaplay teams also use BeBanjo for checking scheduling statuses, validating rights and metadata, tracking workflows, and showcasing the progress of different departments internally through the Reporter Module.
From BeBanjo’s Work page teams, suppliers, and vendors from all over the world can work together sharing schedules, tasks and workflows in real-time. Through the list of pending titles, teams can track the status of content that’s being processed and see if there are any problems, missing material or incomplete tasks. Teams can also track who’s working on what title at the moment. All of this information is readily accessible from the convenience of any browser, which means teams can work from any place and from any device with an internet connection.
“We started out with only the Viaplay team using BeBanjo but later we added teams working on our linear channels, Viafree and also external platforms. We are now close to 100 users and we are using it for all sorts of things,” Urban said. “With COVID-19, working from home was no problem at all. Since everything is web-based with BeBanjo, after we made the decision to work remotely in March, it all worked out beautifully.”
Expanding Into New Platforms And Territories
Because Viaplay is sending SVOD content or catch up libraries to almost all major players in the Nordics, it was important for their content management teams to find a VOD scheduling solution that is flexible in its data architecture and allows for adding and configuring new platforms easily. Be it growing the number of platforms or expanding to new territories, Viaplay needed a solution that allows for changing metadata validation requirements flexibly and fast, reducing costs and eliminating inefficiencies.
"Again and again working with BeBanjo has proven to be straightforward"
“In terms of expansion, we can quickly set up what we need in new territories in BeBanjo. In the Baltics, we will probably have 3 different languages per region. Setting up the metadata validation for that will be quite easy with the configurable mapping layer,” Urban explained to us.
The configurable mapping layer is part of BeBanjos Superset metadata exporter, which allows the delivery of content and technical metadata in formats different from the ones offered by BeBanjo out-of-the-box (see our list of integrations here). As new validation requirements are configured in the mapping layer, the payload updates automatically, and new publications are made based on the most recent configuration.
“Again and again working with BeBanjo has proven to be straightforward,” Urban added. “This is not that common in this industry. Usually, you bang your head against walls. But of course, BeBanjo does not offer a one size fits all solution. There have been times when we had to build workarounds, but we never hit a firm roadblock. With BeBanjo, we always help each other out to move forward.”