Live Press Association feeds for AOL Sports
Data transformation project powers Fanhouse site
Press Association is the leading multimedia content provider and national news agency offering unrivalled content and digital media services. As home to the national news agency of the UK and Ireland, the Press Association proudly takes its place at the heart of the UK media news providing a continuous feed of text, pictures, video and data into newsrooms around the country.
Challenge
Fusionworkshop were asked by the Press Association to work on a project to transform XML to provide live feeds to AOL Sport's popular Fanhouse site. This gateway consumes large volumes of sports results information, including live feeds, and surfaces the data for AOL's Global Content Delivery Network.
Approach
A consultancy approach was taken to design, build and manage a high-performance sports results gateway. It provided a good example of Fusionworkshop's formal approach projects where innovative thinking is required. This was a complex project involving working with teams in the USA, India and across the UK.
The first usage of this Gateway was to deliver the live feeds for AOL Sport’s Fanhouse site.
Results
The service now powers the 'tickers', football pages, including fixtures, results and tables from the Conference to the Premier League plus Champions League, European Championships and England Internationals.
Cricket has also been rolled out to support the Fanhouse offering.
“We engaged Fusionworkshop to help us to deliver a demanding, dynamic sports data portal for a key client with a significant audience. The proposition spanned multiple domestic and international competitions in Football, Cricket and Rugby, providing a live results service.
Online sports propositions rely on speed of delivery and accuracy. Delivering a service that could handle the huge volume and frequency of data for this solution required real technical nous and integrity, but Fusionworkshop’s ability to add a presentation layer that fitted the exacting requirements of the customer, was a real strength.
Effective stakeholder communication and management was always going be a key issue for this project; the client’s technical resources were divided between the UK, India and the USA; the Press Association’s resources in editorial, product development and data were split between sites in Yorkshire and London.
But, with a very demanding schedule and changing requirements, the Fusionworkshop team expertly managed the development, delivery and subsequently the ongoing support of the project with flair, skill and dependability. They didn’t just work to spec; they helped to solve problems for the customer.
As project owner, I always knew the exact status of the project, with respect to delivery timescales and I was always alerted at the earliest possible stage about any issues that could impact the project - freeing me to effectively manage the business relationship.”
Ian Davies,
Head of Product Development
Press Association is the leading multimedia content provider and national news agency offering unrivalled content and digital media services.
“We engaged Fusionworkshop to help us deliver a demanding, dynamic sports portal. The service had to handle huge volumes and frequency of data but Fusionworkshop's technical nous and integrity was a real strength. Effective stakeholder communication across the UK, India and the USA was another key issue. The team expertly managed the development, delivery and ongoing support with flair, skill and dependability. Fusionworkshop didn't just work to spec; they helped to solve problems for the customer...”
Ian Davies,
Head of Product Development
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