RCS provided a full identity re-design for Sky Italia’s flagship news channel TG24. Based in Rome with financial reporting from Milan, TG24 had a decade of using Deko for it’s on air graphics. Making the switch to Vizrt was primarily motivated for the improved workflow opportunities but also to better integrate the channel with the rest of the broadcaster’s output, including all of it’s Sport channels which were all Viz based productions. Reality Check Systems were tasked with recreating the TG24 signature style in Viz, but also introducing some modernity with transition logic, as well as some interfacing of elements such as the Sondaggio (or question of the day) – a daily viewer poll that received votes either by text or remote. In addition the channel has a strong interaction with social media so RCS had to also integrate with the channels’ Twitter and Facebook activity. Creating a suite of templates in Content Pilot to integrate into iNews, RCS created various levels of template to accommodate the various requirements of the channel. Journalists were being introduced for the first time to the preparation of on-air graphics and we undertook the training.
In addition we trained the in-house graphics team to be able to adapt and amend the templates we had delivered to ensure that they would be able to continue to create more graphics as required. One particular challenge of the channel was the fact that they have a continuous “Active” channel that plays a delayed feed of the main channel. Previously TG24 took their output into an edit bay and removed any time sensitive graphics (such as breaking news or promos) before playing them out on the delayed Active Channel. In Content Pilot we created a Split Fork Execution solution that ensured that specific graphics identified by the editorial team would not be played out on the Active Channel thereby automating a huge amount of additional work in the edit bays. After a successful launch the channel continues to deploy new graphics created by the internal team with the journalists taking on more and more responsibility for the creation of graphics to add to their rundowns.