About the customer
Have you ever wondered just how the inflight entertainment made its way to the seat back screen in front of you? Chances are, it was served up by Anuvu.
Founded in 2013, Anuvu provides entertainment services aboard global airlines, including United, Hawaiian Airlines and Cathay Pacific. And the sky is not the limit for Anuvu - they continue to expand their footprint into Maritime, Government and other sectors. Today Anuvu has 1,000 employees across 6 continents.
Accommodating the huge number of localised metadata elements required
As Anuvu charted their course, they knew they would ultimately need tools that enabled them to schedule and distribute thousands of titles efficiently each month. These tools would also need to accommodate the massive number of localised metadata elements required across their partner airlines, and store them in a structured and streamlined way.
The right solution would be dynamic and flexible enough to make onboarding new partners, or adapting to changing partner requirements, simple and speedy.
And partner data was not the only priority - for Anuvu, being able to extract data about their assets and the scheduling process itself was important too.
Delivering content in multiple languages across multiple territories
Since 2018 BeBanjo’s SaaS solution has provided flexibility and transparency to Anuvu’s globally distributed team of schedulers, analysts, editorial metadata coordinators, who have produced over 300,000 schedule entries in that time. Nearly 100 users work in BeBanjo’s Schedule, Catalogue, Sequence, Publisher, and Reporter modules today. It takes a village to bring entertainment in for an on time arrival! 🌏📼✈️🙌
Today Anuvu delivers content in over 20 languages to airlines based across nearly 100 countries. As they have continued to expand, BeBanjo has frictionlessly scaled to meet Anuvu’s needs. Between November 2019 and October 2020 Anuvu created 21,993 schedule entries in BeBanjo. Between November 2020 and October 2021 Anuvu created 115,081 schedule entries - they scaled their volume of schedulings over 400% in one year. And between November 2021 and October 2022 Anuvu produced even more schedulings than the year prior, a total of 141,133, representing an additional growth in schedulings by 20% YOY.
BeBanjo’s productized API and interface have streamlined and organized the business of metadata management, scheduling, and publishing, while being dynamic enough to support Anuvu through such rapid growth and evolution.
For Anuvu, the work occurs across several systems, with BeBanjo products at the intersection of planning and execution:
- Titles and avails are generated in the contract system that sits upstream of BeBanjo’s Catalogue. An integration built by Anuvu detects events in the rights system and triggers delivery of the relevant title metadata to the Catalogue via the BeBanjo API.
- Anuvu’s global team of schedulers work in the Non-Linear Schedule to execute plans by regions and platforms, selecting versions of titles from the catalogue specific to the airline customer’s technical requirements and the regions they serve. The Anuvu team sends the schedule entries to BeBanjo’s workflow tracking tool, Sequence, to kickoff fulfilment of materials.
- An integration with Sequence checks with Anuvu’s Content Management System for asset availability based on the airline customer’s technical requirements. For example, an airline based in Italy may require Italian subtitles and/or audio dubbing on English language content. Based on asset details in Sequence the integration interacts with the CMS to identify missing materials, and continues to update status of all assets and related tasks in Sequence as they progress through media processing. When workflow is complete that status is visible in BeBanjo and lets schedulers know the title is ready. Anuvu’s Content Management System also communicates directly with the API, informing the Schedule module of the technical metadata relevant to the scheduled assets for a title. This technical metadata is housed with the schedule entry in BeBanjo for inclusion in publication payloads.
- In some cases editorial metadata needs to be translated for inclusion in the payload. A translation integration built between BeBanjo and Unbabel uses stored platform requirements to make sure the required source metadata is available. If it is, the integration generates a translation job that is pushed to Unbabel, retrieves jobs from the Unbabel API on a scheduled cycle, updates status of the tasks and assets associated with preparation of the title in Sequence, and populates the new translations to their appropriate metadata fields in BeBanjo.
- Once all assets, tasks, editorial and technical metadata are accounted for, for many platforms the Schedulers publish via BeBanjo’s Superset exporter concept - an agnostic and comprehensive output subsequently parsed and delivered to partner’s specifications by Anuvu.
Example: asset and translation workflow tracked in Sequence and surfaced in the Non-Linear Schedule module
Example: Non-Latin character metadata translations housed in BeBanjo, automatically populated to the API via an integration with language operations platform Unbabel
As titles cycle through the workflow, BeBanjo’s Reporter module delivers Anuvu’s business dataset - transformed and ready for ingest to the BI tool of their choice. Anuvu combines data from BeBanjo with their data insights on customers, cost information, order management detail, and end to end cycle time measurements to help inform timely business decisions.
No hardware or hosted software required
Anuvu sought a solution that delivered flexibility and efficiency to their scheduling workflow, and brought order and deduplication to the complex web of localization and metadata deliverables needed to support their airline clients.
Before BeBanjo, Anuvu’s Editorial team would rewrite English titles and synopses per title / per airline (sometimes per specific playout device) / per scheduling cycle - and then that new data would get translated per title / per airline / per scheduling cycle - They needed a relational database - fully integrated into the workflow - to solve it.
As a metadata specialist at Anuvu explained, BeBanjo’s suite was the first system that “made it all work in a smarter way” for their team.
No more hodgepodge of spreadsheets, manual execution of repetitive operational tasks, no duplicated effort. BeBanjo’s well documented APIs and transparent model make it easy for Anuvu to input and extract data as needed; automated asset management and translation processes are initiated with a click, bringing efficiency and control to addressing localizations and other partner technical specifications; and bulk management of metadata and schedules is simplified via a user friendly and configurable interface. All securely, from wherever the Anuvu team has internet access - no hardware or hosted software required.