Case Study: Broadcast Education Association achieves reliable, scalable video contest submissions and streamlined awards management with OpenWater

Broadcast Education Association - Customer Case Study

Broadcast Education Association (BEA) faced a crisis when its ad hoc awards system and hosting provider failed during the Festival of Media Arts video contest: a remote server melted 12 hours before the deadline, wiping out roughly 75% of submissions (more than 700 entries) and exposing problems with fragmented, non‑integrated tools, manual spreadsheets, and no Avectra integration. To solve this, BEA selected OpenWater Awards as its new awards management platform.

OpenWater Awards built a custom, branded, fully integrated submission and judging site that eliminated multiple logins and manual score tallying; in 2014 the platform successfully handled 1,351 video entries with no major upload or hosting issues. OpenWater Awards also provided training and ongoing support, consolidated judges into a single interface, automated scoring and winner calculation, and drove year‑over‑year entry growth and much greater operational efficiency.

Broadcast Education Association

J-D Boyle

Director of Sales and Marketing