Democracy Now! Turns to Polygon Labs for Real-Time Election Graphics

Democracy Now!’s daily, global, independent news hour, hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González, is broadcast every weekday on over 1,500 stations in the U.S., Canada, and 45 other countries around the globe. For nearly 25 years, Democracy Now! has been reporting breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. Democracy Now! airs on Pacifica, NPR, community, college, and satellite radio stations; PBS, public, community, and satellite TV; and is viewed by millions of people online each day at democracynow.org, where the show streams live daily and is available on-demand. Additional web-exclusive video interviews are also made available on-demand and are viewed by millions of people around the globe and shared widely across social media platforms.

Like many global publishers and broadcasters who are creating high volumes of news output, Democracy Now! faced the challenge of quickly creating sophisticated graphics content for its platform. In 2018, the daily news hour tasked Polygon Labs to update its on-air look and real-time Vizrt graphics. A New York City-based creative services and software solutions studio, Polygon Labs focuses on engaging broadcast and digital media content, visualization, virtual production, news, sports, weather, and traffic interactive storytelling, data feed management, and real-time graphics branding. Once their daily show on-air graphics had been updated, which included a design overhaul for a more modern look and feel as well as new templates for audience-friendly visualizations of tweets, cell phone video, and other elements, Democracy Now! again turned to Polygon Labs to fulfill its graphic requirements, this time for its U.S. Election coverage.

Democracy Now! has subscribed to Polygon Labs’ Creative Hub, a remote, on-demand creative and professional services subscription that specializes in real-time graphics, channel branding, and virtual production. A cost-effective, multi-disciplined, on-demand broadcast design and developer subscription-based service, Creative Hub allows news publishers and broadcasters like Democracy Now! to book any size project for virtual studios, augmented reality, branding, real-time graphics packages, interactive story-telling graphics, video walls, multi-screen tickers, downstream channels, using a flexible utilization plan with no blackout dates. The subscriber simply purchases a number of creative service hours per month and uses them when desired. Creative Hub provides users like Democracy Now! with services for real-time production using Vizrt, Unreal Engine and other real-time graphics platforms, as well as postproduction projects utilizing Adobe and Autodesk solutions. Projects are developed remotely and delivered using online access project files.

Using Polygon Labs’ team of professional multi-disciplined designers, developers and producers with cross-platform and hybrid production expertise, Democracy Now! can request new graphics and templates, or changes to existing graphics, to be used with its Vizrt system. Polygon Labs designs the graphics and creates the templates that drive them, providing full integration with the newsroom system. The Democracy Now! operator simply populates the templates and the story is ready to air.

This flexible on-demand approach means Democracy Now! can seamlessly manage production peaks during busy election periods. The unpredictability of a global news cycle means that Democracy Now! requires a nimble real-time approach to ensure that their broadcast graphics projects fit their workflow and the demands of the news cycle. They have the absolute confidence to know that they can tackle any size project without worrying about planning and resources. Polygon Labs can scale the resources assigned to Democracy Now’s! needs dynamically. Sometimes the project may only require a Vizrt designer, other times it might include requirement for a data integration scripter, a 3D modeling expert, or even an Art Director to design a look. Creative Hub provides Democracy Now! with numerous resources available in multiple disciplines.