TV schedule analytics dashboard
TV schedules that staff compiled by hand and charted in Excel are now collected automatically and viewed on screen. The weekly rebuild that took more than 4 hours now takes under a minute.
Manual work time
Before
4+ hours
After
Under 1 minute
To protect client information, these screens recreate the same features with mock data.
Background
TV schedules change every week. Knowing how much airtime the company’s content gets on each channel, and what competitors are doing, means watching the schedules constantly.
What we found
Staff compiled the schedules by hand and built each chart one by one in Excel. Every week the same work started from scratch. Comparing with an earlier period meant finding the old files and lining them up again.
The problem
Automating collection alone piles up numbers that nobody reads, and someone ends up opening Excel again. Manual work only goes away when collecting, viewing and reporting are connected as one process.
What we built
There are two deliverables: one for collecting and one for viewing.
- Collection console — Staff register which channels to collect and switch them on or off. Collection status and run history are on the same screen, and schedules can be downloaded as Excel. Adding a channel does not require a developer
- Analysis screen — Weekly and monthly airtime trends, comparisons with the same period last year and year to date, own-content share and competitor IP comparisons on one screen
Before automating collection, we turned the staff’s selection criteria into rules. Which items to keep and which to drop existed only in people’s heads, not in any document. Automation built on that basis would produce results no one could trust. The many detailed requirements actually helped: the more specific the criteria, the more of them can become rules.
Results
Built and delivered in two months. Compiling schedules by hand and charting them in Excel is no longer needed. Staff open the screen to see the current schedule and how it compares with earlier periods.
See more work built the same way under Web data collection.
See more work on this topic under Data analysis.
Cost by collection scale and difficulty — Data collection pricing