All Mobile Video
All Mobile Video (AMV) is the country’s premier provider of end-to-end video and audio solutions for entertainment, sports, and news programming and events. AMV offers a full spectrum of services, including large soundstages in Manhattan (the famous Chelsea Studios) and Los Angeles, with complete post production capabilities, equipment rental services, television master control and streaming media facilities, and remote broadcast production and editing trucks. The company also provides mobile satellite uplink services worldwide to support major sporting events like the Super Bowl, award shows and news gathering organizations.
The company comprises several operating groups that utilize separate fiscal years and general ledgers. However, AMV managers must have visibility into equipment, facility, and personnel availabilities and bookings across all business groups. They must be able to access and schedule resources regardless of the operating group they belong to officially, while maintaining clear, accurate accountings of utilization and costs for reporting purposes.
AMV has been a Xytech customer since 1995 and migrated from their original Xytech Myriad implementation to Xytech Enterprise in 2000. They began planning a migration to MediaPulse in early 2014 and completed the project that summer.
Managers in each AMV operating company now have full visibility into booked and available resources. They can efficiently schedule resources as needed to satisfy their clients’ requirements without creating bottlenecks or scheduling conflicts in sister facilities’ operations. Each operating unit still maintains its own accounting system, but managers can pull reports on every aspect of the business operations, including job cost, profitability, and utilization reports that access scheduling, job and work order data across boundaries between operating groups.
Viasat Broadcasting
Viasat Broadcasting is the leading free and pay TV operator in Scandinavia and the Baltics, with additional broadcast operations in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine and Ghana.
Viasat’s Creative Services Department, headquartered in London, was relying on a combination of spreadsheets and manual tools to manage, monitor and bill for the production of channel and program promos used in Viasat programming around the world. The group produces over 5,000 promos annually and vital financial data was being recorded inaccurately or lost. Viasat’s controller needed an integrated system to manage and report on all operational and financial activities of group operations.
The company implemented MedaPulse workflow management software in less than 30 days.
Today, the company reports:
- 25% to 33% reduction in operating costs
- Time to produce cost reports reduced from two days to less than two hours
- At-a-glance view of facility operations on a single screen
- More efficient production planning
Hear what Paula Moscardo, Viasat’s Creative Services Controller, has to say about her experiences with MediaPulse.
Judith Edelstein is Viasat’s Production and Bookings Coordinator. Listen to Judith explain how using MediaPulse has allowed her to manage production schedules more efficiently.
Sunset Gower + Sunset Bronson
The Sunset Gower and Sunset Bronson Studios comprise about 880,000 square feet of sound stages, post-production, and office space used by independent producers, movie studios and television network customers to create a wide range of original programming that is distributed all over the world. The two facilities were using separate and incompatible systems to manage their business operations. Manual and spreadsheet-based processes were inefficient, making financial analysis and reporting difficult and tedious. The company needed a single system that would support its expanding operations and also be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations.
The company selected Xytech MediaPulse as the preferred system to replace its legacy software. The project team built a test platform using data from one of the operations and worked with Xytech consultants to configure the implementation to meet the specific requirements of each of the two main facilities. The team used a single instance of MediaPulse with the system’s Divisions feature enabled in order to provide each facility with independent sets of business logic and operational preferences and also enable combined reporting.
The Sunset Gower and Sunset Bronson Studios are now operating with a fully SOX-compliant system with reporting on combined operations for multiple divisions. Facility, personnel and equipment utilization is optimized. People are spending significantly less time on paperwork and more time doing things that help the company succeed.
CBS Television City
CBS Television City in Los Angeles is a $100 million a year production facility. Over the past 50 years it has hosted the production of many of television’s most famous shows, including the longest running five-days-a-week game show in the world, ”The Price Is Right”. Its eight soundstages range in size up to 15,000 square feet. More than 600 operations employees in over 60 departments provide virtually every service a television producer could want.
Before implementing Xytech, CBS Television City used a number of paper-based and mainframe-hosted legacy system to manage scheduling and billing with very little integration between the various systems. Producers would request backup detail on invoices, which would drive up costs while the facility manually researched and delivered the details, and delay payment by as much as six months. Meanwhile, the double data entry required to produce consolidated invoices also meant that invoices were subject to inaccuracies.
After a thorough industry search and contemplation of an array of different solutions, CBS Television City chose the Xytech. The Xytech solution has dramatically increased the productivity of CBS Television City’s production, scheduling, and billing operations.
Watch this video to learn how CBS Television City improved the efficiency of their operations, lowered costs and increased revenues by implementing Xytech.