SVG Sit-Down: Wazee Digital Mike Arthur on the Company's Evolution and the Oncoming Onslaught of Sports Content

SVG Sit-Down: Wazee Digital Mike Arthur on the Company's Evolution and the Oncoming Onslaught of Sports Content Wazee Digital has moved beyond licensing into cloud-based MAM and content management at events By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor

Friday, June 23, 2017 - 8:30 am

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Wazee Digital has been known primarily for its content-licensing business for more than a decade - working with a variety of industries, including film, news, and sports. Sports clients range from the NCAA and PGA TOUR to USA Swimming and World Surf League (WSL). While licensing continues to be an integral part of the Denver-based company's business, Wazee Digital is broadening its horizons, most notably with its Wazee Digital Core cloud-based media-asset-management (MAM) platform and Digital Media Hub SaaS portal, powered by Core, for centralized content distribution during events like the U.S. Open.

SVG sat down with Mike Arthur, VP, sports and live events, to discuss Wazee Digital's evolution, where he sees the industry headed, and how the company can help content owners manage and distribute the approaching flood of original sports content.

Mike Arthur, VP, sports and live events, Wazee Digital

How is Wazee Digital's overall strategy changing?

I think the equity in our brand is built on our licensing expertise. About three years ago, we started to focus on the elite technology that enables everything. Yes, licensing is a sweet spot of ours, and we will continue to nurture and support it because we are very good at what we do in that space. However, we also felt like the actual digital-asset-management platform that we utilize here internally and now externally, referred to as Wazee Digital Core, was a very valuable part of our offering. From a business standpoint, we felt it represented larger growth opportunities with more significant improvements for the market in terms of content management and monetizing content in various formats.

Thus, we shifted our priorities so that, in addition to being a licensing-services company, we became a complete asset-management platform on top of which licensing, event services, and digital-asset management and more now sit. Licensing was our birthright, if you will, and we will continue to serve that [market]. However, we will also provide many other services - all sitting on our Core SaaS platform.

How do you see the sports-content market evolving, and how is Wazee Digital adapting to the changes?

In the sports market specifically, there are a couple of different things going on. Our sweet spot is with properties that have heavily viewed content but aren't necessarily large enough to have their own [content-management] division with an on-demand MAM and cloud storage [system]. We do have several partners who do have an on-premises MAM for certain projects, though we usually represent the largest portion of their library because they are in multiple locations and need to have global centralized access. U.S. Tennis Association, for example, has a [facility] in White Plains, NY, and just opened another large facility in Orlando, so the ability to connect to the same content via the cloud from various locations is one of the benefits to the cloud.

There's also the disaster-recovery angle for those customers that have an on-premises MAM.

Over the [past] six or seven years, the ability to produce high-quality content cost-effectively and simply has revolutionized the industry and totally changed the dynamic. You started seeing NFL franchises - who [had been] very limited from a content-creation standpoint because of the limitations of the league's rights agreements - producing vast amounts of content. Through today's [distribution] mediums, social specifically, those teams can connect with their fan bases in an entirely different way that doesn't rub up against those league-wide rights agreements. And, because production [tools] became so much cheaper, they have been able to serve those outlets with a lot of content.

So, from a sports and live-events standpoint, I think we have an amazing opportunity to provide access to cost-effective storage and manipulation through a dynamic archive environment using Core as the platform. That also enables a licensing component, as well as opportunities for our Digital Media Hub.

What is Digital Media Hub, and how is it being used at major sports events?

Digital Media Hub essentially offers a web portal at events that provides [property owners] with centralized access to acquire and distribute content from that event. That can be video highlights, stills, press conferences, audio highlights, and pretty much anything else the media would need. All of that can be distributed out to multiple locations by the user.

We recently spun up a Digital Media Hub at [a major golf tournament], and the beauty of it was that it was for every single type of media. We had all the video highlights from the course, entire press conferences, audio, transcripts, stills, flyover shots. It was also permission-enabled: if one of their major partners was logging in, they would have access to everything; if a local affiliate was logging in, they might have a couple of highlights and some transcripts and press conferences, [depending] on what their access was.

Taking that content, adding metadata, flexible transcode workflows, manipulating it in whatever way the property chooses, and then being able to publish it or post it straight to YouTube or Facebook (with other digital endpoints pending), we're finding, is very valuable. On top of that, we often are the licensing agent of record for that content, so we can immediately start to monetize that content. The Digital Media Hub also provides broadcasters with a cost-effective way to grab content for shoulder programming.

The Core platfor

LINK:	http://www.sportsvideo.org/2017/06/23/svg-sit-down-wazee-digital-mike-...
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