Al Jazeera Turns to Vizrt, Astucemedia for U.S. Presidential Election Graphics

Al Jazeera turned voting-data into compelling storytelling to help viewers at home get a better understanding of election results. As part of its live coverage of this year’s U.S. Presidential race, Al Jazeera Media Network provided viewers with up-to-the-second voting results. The results were visualized by an integrated data analytics and real-time graphics rendering solution from Astucemedia and Vizrt. The solution allows broadcasters to take real-time voting data and easily turn it into compelling on-screen graphics to help viewers at home get a better understanding of election results.

The Astucemedia and Vizrt graphics solution was used network wide for the U.S. Elections by live programs produced for Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Mubasher and Al Jazeera Balkans. The results were displayed in English, Arabic, and Serbo-Croatian.

Al Jazeera’s Decision Desk was broadcast from the network’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Leveraging the speed and flexibility of the Astucemedia/Vizrt solution, special templates were set up to automatically retrieve the data and display fully rendered 3D graphics in real-time on the various channels the Al Jazeera Media Network serves. Producers used the Astucemedia US Election Data Platform web interface to monitor and manage live results data from the Associated Press (AP). The platform also allowed Al Jazeera to analyze the live data to make their own editorial calls on projections for the state race and published the same data to Al Jazeera’s web-site.

“The speed and flexibility of this joint real-time 3D graphics solution allowed Al Jazeera’s staff to get results to the screen faster and more efficiently,” says François Laborie, Chief Commercial Officer at Vizrt. “With graphics templates designed to automatically retrieve the data and display it on the various platforms Al Jazeera staff had the option to make early projections if needed or wait for the official AP winner projections and results.”

In addition to the on-screen graphics and charts, the Astucemedia/Vizrt solution also drove Al Jazeera’s on-set video walls in their studios and facilitated augmented reality (AR) graphics to represent the House and Senate races. The AR graphics were created using tracking from Motion Analysis, the Astucemedia Election Data Platform, and the Viz Virtual Studio software package from Vizrt.

“The solution is so elegant because Astucemedia plugins run seamlessly inside the Viz Engine to ease the flow of live data into attractive graphics in Vizrt and also for mobile and web , but also provide this enhanced middle-layer between AP and Vizrt,” says Alexandre Leclerc, CEO at Astucemedia. “We’ve worked with Vizrt on other projects and have had immense success on the creative and technical aspect. We saw the same during Al Jazeera Network’s coverage of the U.S. Presidential Election Night.”