Bannister Lake Teams Up With Global Television

Global Television's coverage of the Alberta provincial election in April featured two new data-driven products designed to communicate the nuances of election results to viewers and editorial teams.

Bannister Lake worked closely with Global Television's production, design, and technical teams to deliver a touchscreen-based series of web widgets that incorporated live election results, historical results, and important demographic data. Global Television used the highly responsive web widgets to illustrate the connections between election results and contextual data such as household income and family status. By using easy-to-read maps, viewers could instantly comprehend and contrast regional and city-suburban voting outcomes.

Bannister Lake's development of HTML5-based widgets adds an exciting dimension to election coverage and can be easily launched for other live data applications including sports, finance, and eSports. The widgets can be built quickly and are specifically designed to be fully responsive and interactive. Most importantly, the same products can be used on-air as well as online, granting viewers full access and control over the specific content they want to consume.

"As broadcasters look to expand their election coverage online and to mobile devices, our web widgets will play a vital role," said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. "Not only do they create a highly visual, interactive experience for viewers, they also allow interesting datasets to be incorporated, helping tell a more complete and compelling election story."

Global Television also took full advantage of a new feature set recently added to Elector, Bannister Lake's election race software solution. Elector's Results Timeline feature helps analysts and reporters better predict race outcomes. Results Timeline displays a graphical timeline of election results per constituency or per party that is consistently updated as data comes in. This feature provides an easy way to read visual representation of the overall voting trend and allows analysts to quickly identify races that are fluctuating dramatically, have a clear winner early on, or are too close to call.

"Election night coverage is all about results," said Gerry Belec, director of news technology and operations at Corus Entertainment. "Having Bannister Lake on our side, creating innovative data solutions, was instrumental in producing a great broadcast. The touch-enabled maps and the new features in Elector allowed us to use data in new ways that genuinely engaged our audience."

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