Fox Sports

Media Management Application

Overview

FOX Sports needed a branded application that allowed their affiliate stations who received promos and broadcast media assets to use a curated on-demand web based approach.

Problem / Opportunity

Many affiliate stations needed to grab raw promos and other broadcast assets directly off a satellite feed which was broadcast via a video tape created the night before from the head office. This was an often difficult and expensive process to broadcast and receive. In particular, if a media asset needed to be updated, the entire process, including a quality control check would need to be run again on both ends.

Setting up a curated online application would enable stations to grab what they needed, when they needed it. It would also allow for new and updated media to be downloaded and vetted online by both management and the stations themselves. This streamlined process would save time, manpower and money by eliminating a tape based workflow and costly satellite fees.

Goals

Customer

Provide affiliate stations with a method to easily preview and download media assets they needed and which needed to be updated due to last minute changes (such as player injuries).

Business

Exercise greater control over the curation of media assets and reduce potentially costly mistakes from incorrect content. In addition, the business would save time and money by reducing overall distribution costs.

Process

The project was a combination of a more traditional waterfall design approach up front and and Agile process during production. Basic wireframes and personas were generated, stakeholders signed off and then a few high fidelity comps were created. These comps would form the basis of the general look and feel. As feature requirements would change, adjustments would be made and new wireframes would need to be generated. The wireframes referenced System X as the generic brand which would be replaced with the FOX Sports brand or other brands if needed.

Solution

An online Angular/Bootstrap .NET based application was developed to manage the media assets, which included curation and automatic affiliate access to assets when they were ready. A decision was made to brand the login page with Sports brands and use the new general FOX MediaCloud branding once inside.

Results

FOX Sports, was extremely happy with the end results which indeed saved them time, money and manpower by an appreciable margin. They commissioned additional work to be done for another unit to add monitoring and download capabilities for another division in addition to the affiliate stations. Customer service reported much fewer than normal user issues and users appeared be actively choosing to work with the new application, even when presented with a choice to use the old workflow. The app was also repurposed to serve the needs for FOX International Channels (FIC) and was well received there as well.

Personal Contribution

I was brought in halfway into the process to work with a third party design vendor to represent FOX’s internal UX interests and customers as well as work on FOX’s internal development IT team who did much of the heavy lifting to aid the vendor in meeting the deadline. I helped to design and give input on the current design choices and future choices moving forward for additional features. I also had a hand in the actual front end implementation of much of the UI. I also conducted user testing, interviews and ethnographic studies.