Hi Kara, we're currently using 2 NOW apps... one for news and one for traffic.   You can find them here:
https://www.wfmz.com/station/apps/

Overall been very happy with the experience.  Best part is that the articles include most everything that a use would see on the desktop version of the article (related items, maps, inline Tweets, etc).  They've been very stable, and the display and menu structure is very easy to change in the Blox CMS.  Very pleased so far.  Audience acceptance was mixed - but we expected that since it was quite a change from our previous app.  Happy to answer any other specific questions.

sorry Nicholas, just seeing this now.  Email me directly at "eric@wfmz.com" and I'll see what I can help with

We've been using it for a few months now in the Philadelphia market, and seems to be working well.  We haven't had many upsells from users, but since there are national contributors, the accuracy has greatly increased.  With our previous calendar, venues had scheduled events far in advance, and when the pandemic hit, they didn't bother to update them.  With Evvnt, those events with national sales (Ticketmaster, etc) are now automatically updated

We are also using Webhooks, but with custom PHP scripts on our local server.  We use the webhooks in conjunction with the Blox notifier to alert our staff to AP news alerts, as well as generate push notifications to our third party mobile app.

We've been experiencing difficulties in publishing livestreams in a timely  fashion.  Often, a news conference is scheduled to begin at a particular time, but officials are typically late.  When we publish the livestream 10 minutes early (so we can clear the cache), we might have an additional 15 minutes of an empty podium waiting for the officials to arrive... our users give up and drop the livestream.

We'd like the ability to break the cache on things like this so that we can publish the livestream quickly (when the news conference actually begins), send out a push notification, and keep our viewers engaged.

We've tried using the 'breaking news' flag idea, but apparently that has restrictions on when the asset is created.  We typically use an unpublished template asset that we've previously created in the CMS  - duplicate it, rename it, and we're ready to go.  So the flag idea isn't working.   If breaking the cache were dependent upon the asset 'modify' time or 'start' time, this would likely work for us.

It would be great to have a product that allows us to have an individual widget for each race that could be placed on multiple pages.  That way, we can build a page for each county.  Or, a page for just statewide races.   Or even a page just for the referendums.  Kinda mix and match the races to create some custom displays.

Would be great to include the ability to update the entire race (not just vote counts) programatically...   That's very helpful when, an hour after the polls close, you find out it's "John Smyth" and not "John Smith."

Also, lots of CSS selectors for custom styling of the widgets.

Christine,

We've considered using scheduled pages, but it would mean that everytime we update our home page with a new block or make changes to the layout, we would need to make changes to two different pages.  And that would be true for any section for which we may wish to use the schedule (sports, entertainment, etc).  Too cumbersome to keep track of since we frequently make changes and updates.

Much easier to schedule individual components (blocks) on those pages.

On our previous site, we had many items scheduled:

- 3 different Friday night football links:  Tonight at 11, Watch Now, Watch Highlights

- Inside your Town:  Long form articles about town and schoolboard meetings (only showed up Tue - Sat)

- Out and About: Upcoming weekend events (visible Thur - Sun)

- History's Headlines: weekly local history feature (only weekends)

We also schedule contests and promotions that have a limited lifespan and used schedules to automatically remove them.

We would also like to have a block to link to our live newscasts (Watch Now) appear only during newscast times.

Our previous CMS allowed us to schedule elements throughout the site.  Very helpful for things like Friday night football, regularly scheduled live newscasts, and even weekend "out and about" sections that need to be removed Sunday nights.

Please consider adding this feature to the CMS!