Telly addicts

Q&A with Enteraction TV: Enteraction TV’s new intranet system CADIZ enables clients to view and approve television footage any time and from any location. Enterprise Information spoke to Michelle Gordon, communications director at the company.

Enterprise Information (EI): Enteraction TV (etv) recent won the prize for the best intranet project at the Information Management Awards 2005. Could you tell us a little about your winning project?

Michelle Gordon (MG): CADIZ is a secure intranet system that enables etv’s staff, clients and partners to electronically view footage of the television programmes we produce. It is an Adobe Flash-based system, which is accessed via the internet and which enables video footage to be viewed by clients in different locations and signed off within tight broadcast deadlines. The system is easily accessible and has provided enormous time and cost savings to the production process. In doing so, CADIZ has helped us to become far more efficient in the way we make television for our clients.

EI: And what was the thinking behind this intranet project?

MG: As a company, etv produces and runs a number of television channels on Sky Digital, such as Thomas Cook TV. We were experiencing increasing difficulties in getting video footage to clients and signed off. The main issue we wanted to address was to make our approvals process more efficient and to ensure that we always met deadlines with the minimum level of stress. As a company that has been growing steadily, but significantly, year on year, we recognised that creating such a system would help us to properly implement any additional client work to the same high delivery standards.

EI: So what are the main functions of the system?

MG: CADIZ is a secure intranet system that enables our staff, clients and partners to electronically view footage of the television programmes we produce, from wherever they may be at a given point in time. That is of tremendous use to clients such as Thomas Cook, for example, whose executives travel regularly and need to be able to view content from locations all around the world. It also allows us to feed back comments to the programme producers and make any necessary amendments to the footage. Importantly, it also means that we are able to ensure that all the programmes that we broadcast meet regulatory standards.

EI: Could you tell us a little more about how that works?

MG: Basically, CADIZ is an Adobe Flash-based system. It is accessed via the internet through a standard web browser and is password-protected. Once footage has been uploaded onto the system, an e-mail is automatically sent to a registered user who is authorised to view the footage. The person uploading the footage, usually the media manager or producer, is able to list particular areas that the user needs to review. This function is provided in a check box on the right-hand side of the screen.

Once the registered user has logged on to the system and viewed the footage, they are required to indicate whether the material has been approved or whether there are changes to be made. If the user clicks the button for changes, an e-mail is automatically sent back to the person who uploaded the footage. The viewer is required to include specific comments – such as advice, criticism, suggested amendments and so on – within that e-mail.

At any given time, there may be several people reviewing material on one programme and there might also be several approval stages before the programme goes to air. In addition to getting client approval, each programme also needs to be approved by a compliance lawyer to ensure that the material meets regulatory standards. So it’s important that lawyers also have access to the system in order to view and approve footage.

EI: Can you tell us a little more about CADIZ’s journey from design to implementation? What were the various stages of the project?

MG: Our director of television and our operations director defined the need for such a system and instigated the project. Between the two of them, they developed a brief for our multimedia designer. The briefing stage was carried out over several weeks as the designer’s brief was amended to ensure that expectations were realistic and to create a set of parameters for the team to work within. Following this, we liaised with ARC Software, our project partners, who were brought in to create a back-end database that could communicate with the user interface at the front end. The new system was designed and implemented in just over three months including, in the final few weeks, a comprehensive testing process.

EI: What were the main challenges that you faced during this implementation?

MG: During the development phase, we encountered a number of challenges. The main one was to identify a means of combining the streaming server into one unit in order that both the web pages and streaming video could successfully communicate with each other. We spent a significant amount of time testing the server to ensure that there were no glitches and that the correct media assets were deployed each and every time.

We also found it a significant challenge to develop a search tool that would accurately reflect all of the different mechanics required for the approvals process. Although development of the search tool was conducted by one of our suppliers, ARC, it took a lot of time, prior to briefing them, for us to define the parameters for the tool and to ensure that it would enable us to search for everything we needed and to present its findings in the way in which we needed to view them.

EI: What has been the reaction to CADIZ among etv’s users?

MG: CADIZ has been very positively received by users. Staff, for example, have found it significantly easier to access the footage they need, when they need it, and it has been particularly helpful on the occasions when there have been a lot of changes to make within individual programmes. Users who don’t work at our head office, meanwhile, have found it extremely beneficial to be able to access footage from their own offices and also when they are travelling.

We’ve also found that our production costs have gone down, because we no longer need to dub video tapes when they need to be viewed for approval purposes and courier these tapes to different locations. Now that we have successfully implemented the system for one of our major clients, we are in the process of rolling out the project across our client base.

CADIZ has, in many ways, exceeded expectations. As the project team began to develop the system, they realised that it could incorporate more features then initially expected. During the user-testing phase, there were a number of requests from users for additional features which we were able to successfully incorporate into the final design. For example, we changed the system so it is now able to dynamically detect the format size of the footage so that it can be viewed properly.

EI: What do you think has been the most important ‘lesson learned’ from the CADIZ project?

MG: The key lesson has been that the development and briefing stage is absolutely crucial and that as much time as necessary should be given to properly scoping out the project. By attempting to foresee any potential problems and really ‘nut out’ the parameters of the project, we were able to deal with some of issues before they even arose. It also meant that we were able to give ourselves realistic deadlines and therefore plan our resources efficiently so that the implementation did not impact on any client work.

About the company

Enteraction TV (etv) was founded in January 2000 to work with leading brands and retailers looking to exploit the emerging world of digital media. The company specialises in launching digital TV channels and producing branded programming for TV, broadband and mobile. Etv currently produces and runs Thomas Cook TV, London TV, and The Great Big British Quiz, all for Sky Digital. The company will also shortly launch a cinema channel called ‘Eat Cinema’, also on Sky Digital. This channel is a joint venture with a UK cinema consortium that includes BAFTA, the UK Film Council and all of the major distributors and exhibitors. Etv’s interactive division, Red Fig, has provided the interactivity for some of the UK’s biggest ‘audience participation’ TV shows, such as ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here’, and the major international beauty pageant, Miss World.