Building a Fox YouTube' From Scratch: Inside the Development of Fox Sports' Groundbreaking IAS MAM Platform

Building a Fox YouTube' From Scratch: Inside the Development of Fox Sports' Groundbreaking IAS MAM Platform Fox teamed with Google Cloud on the Intelligent Asset Service's next-gen search experience By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024 - 7:00 am

Print This Story | Subscribe

Story Highlights

As Fox Sports has grown exponentially during its nearly 30 years of existence, so too has its sprawling media archive. Over the years, Fox Sports used multiple media-asset-management (MAM) systems in an effort to navigate the growing library, but each came with its own challenges and left something to be desired in terms of user experience.

With the existing tools in the market unable to provide the capabilities the production team required, Fox Sports leadership decided to build a MAM solution from scratch. The result of months of development - initially referred to as Fox YouTube - is the Intelligent Asset Service (IAS).

IAS is a huge step forward for Fox Sports, in my honest opinion, says Pratick Bakhtiani, director of product, media workflows, Fox Sports. And it is just a glimpse of what lies ahead for media management, with rapid changes and the adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning across the media and broadcasting industries.

The result of months of development - initially referred to as Fox YouTube - is the Intelligent Asset Service (IAS).

Journey of Discovery: Working With Google Cloud Who better to build a Fox YouTube than the YouTube masters themselves: Google? Over the past year-plus, Fox Sports has partnered with Google Cloud to introduce innovative media-management solutions using AI, ML, and enhanced search capabilities - redefining the way media has been stored, accessed, and shared within a broadcasting company and providing a next-generation intuitive user experience.

Fox Sports' Pratick Bakhtiani: Building this application took a lot of brainstorming, planning, executing, and iterating in an agile environment.

Fortunately, says Bakhtiani, we were able to strike up a conversation with the Google Cloud leadership, and there was excitement both at Fox Sports and Google Cloud to collaborate and build an application like never before for the media and broadcasting industry. Google Cloud has worked closely with Fox Sports over the years, where they have provided a user-interface vision along with AI and ML capabilities, helping translate our media functional requirements into an amazing application.

Fox Sports and the Google Cloud M&E teams were able to work effectively together, translating functional and non-functional requirements into clear and concise plans to develop, test, and deploy a cloud-native system capable of streaming live assets, uploading local assets, transcoding, indexing media to be available at a quick search, and much more.

Building this application took a lot of brainstorming, planning, executing, and iterating in an agile environment between the two companies, says Bakhtiani. It wouldn't have been possible without the cooperation of Google Cloud engineers and leaders over these years to build an application that has been used in production for over a year now across major events.

How It Works: Bringing a YouTube Sensibility to Media Management The idea of a new media-management system stemmed from the need to be able to search efficiently, which is what IAS does. IAS has a search engine that searches through 1.9 million assets (as of December 2023) in a matter of seconds. The system has been deployed and made available for international events, including FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and Super Bowl LVII in 2023, and will continue to be used on tentpole events in 2024.

The exciting part of this tool is the AI and ML capabilities it possesses, Bakhtiani explains, which are not limited to being able to detect sports actions, reactions, types of shots, etc. Some features came out of the box, while others had to be trained.

The result is an intuitive interface powered by search, allowing users to interact with Fox Sports' media library in the same way they would use most of the same internet applications. The Fox Sports live-production and postproduction teams leverage direct Adobe Premiere integration to deliver live and archived content to editors working on features or live show content.

Fox Sports' Intelligent Asset Service is a cloud-native system capable of streaming live assets, uploading local assets, transcoding, indexing media to be available at a quick search, and much more.

It Takes a Village: Drawing From Multiple Departments To Build IAS For Bakhtiani, who comes from an engineering background and had no previous media experience, the IAS project offered a treasure trove of opportunities to innovate.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this project, he says. Being part of a team working on an innovative solution comes with its own challenges. The best way to approach this challenge is to understand the problem driving the need for this change and the idea of a growth mindset' that helps everyone look at the problem statement from a different perspective.

For Bakhtiani, IAS has represented a constant learning and improvement process, working with Google Cloud to implement its AI tools - such as machine-learning models capable of detecting and indexing sports actions, reactions, types of shots, pageantry - to enhance the search experience.

Fox Sports' Reed Kaufman (left) and Dustin Myers delivered a Keynote Presentation on the Intelligent Asset Service at SVG's Sports Content Management Forum in July.

He cites the support and leadership of Fox Sports' production team as integral to the successful launch of IAS. Specifically, VP, Media Management, David Sobel; VP, Media Workflows, Reed Kaufman; Ex

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2024/01/16/building-a-fox-youtube-from-scr...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines