TORONTO & SAN FRANCISCO—Yangaroo and WideOrbit have announced a partnership that will streamline and automate the delivery of traffic instructions between advertisers and broadcasters. 

As part of the agreement, Yangaroo’s asset management and delivery platform will be integrated with WideOrbit's Electronic Material Instructions module within WideOrbit’s flagship ad sales and commercial operations platform, WO Traffic. The integration facilitates a seamless end-to-end automated exchange of traffic instructions, effectively eliminating errors and saving valuable time for advertisers and broadcasters.

"The API integration between Yangaroo and WideOrbit delivers instant benefits to all advertisers and broadcasters using our platforms,” explained Grant Schuetrumpf, CEO of Yangaroo. “The smooth and immediate exchange of data between the platforms represents a substantial enhancement for all stakeholders involved in managing real-time responses and confirmations when advertisers submit traffic instructions to broadcasters across the USA."

"Our partnership with Yangaroo underscores WideOrbit's dedication to delivering comprehensive tools that better connect TV broadcasters and advertisers, ultimately simplifying day-to-day tasks,” added Susie Hedrick, president and managing director of Traffic Systems at WideOrbit. "By seamlessly transferring traffic instructions to WO Traffic through Yangaroo, we offer advertisers more advanced and automated workflows. This partnership aligns with WideOrbit's Wider-World approach, which aims to provide media companies with broader capabilities, deeper insights, and stronger connections."

As part of the integrated solution, advertisers can simply key in buy and traffic data using Yangaroo. The advertiser then receives immediate feedback that the instructions have been received and processed correctly by a broadcaster that uses WO Traffic, the companies explained. 

"This integration holds significant importance for Yangaroo as it aligns with our ongoing dedication to metadata integration,” emphasized Richard Klosa, CTO at Yangaroo. “Yangaroo plays a critical role in the asset and metadata ecosystem for advertising spot distribution, and this integration represents a pivotal milestone in our long-standing commitment to effectively managing traffic instructions."

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.— Telestream announced that Yangaroo, a Canadian digital media delivery service provider for the music, advertising and awards industries, has chosen Telestream technology to improve and speed its media processing, QC and captioning workflows.

Yangaroo’s patented cloud-based platform, Digital Media Distribution System, is said to automate “dozens of manual steps in a streamlined workflow, eliminating errors and increasing efficiencies. Content, such as music, music videos, and advertising can be quickly distributed to television, radio, media, retailers, awards shows, and other authorized recipients safely. Additionally, the platform manages a number of workflows—such as execution of traffic instructions, award show submissions, and approvals of on-air content.”

Yangaroo processes a variety of media, from short-form ads to long-form programs; and broadcast-ready HD content to low-budget music video productions that are not always technically suitable for broadcast. All this content needs to be managed quickly and efficiently, with minimum operator interaction.

To continue to support its rapid business growth, Yangaroo chose several Telestream products to support its methodology.

At the point of ingest, Yangaroo uses Telestream’s Vidchecker QC software to inspect video files and determine if they are technically suitable for broadcast. This is especially important for music video files. Source files are rated by a traffic light system: green is OK to broadcast. Yellow means some corrective action is needed, while red means the files and their associated reports need to be sent back to the producer for corrections.

The API in Vidchecker allows Yangaroo to customize the QC reports and to extract the error data for use in the next stages of their workflows. They also use Vidchecker to check that TV spots meet broadcast technical standards before they are delivered.

The workflow management and transcoding in the Vantage Media Processing Platform enables automated delivery of a variety of formats. An API enables Yangaroo to manage the process from its own DMDS system with customized workflow processes. The Vantage workflow orchestration is also integrated with Yangaroo’s Teletrax and Nielsen systems to add appropriate watermarking, as well as with Aspera to aid in accelerated network delivery of files.

Telestream CaptionMaker is used to add legally required closed captions.

Although the Yangaroo system is predominantly cloud-based, the media processing is hosted on physical servers at their data center in Toronto. Yangaroo has recently added Telestream Lightspeed K80 servers, which Yangaroo chief technology officer, Richard Klosa, said provide an average performance gain of 50 to 100 percent compared to the generic Dell servers that they initially used.

“We owned CaptionMaker and Vidchecker before they were acquired by Telestream,” Klosa said. “Now that they are all under the Telestream roof, we are finding many workflow benefits, with Vantage acting as the orchestrator between all the elements, managing the QC and captioning processes from a central location.”