Sportel Recap: How the Cloud, AI, and Automated Production Are Changing Everything Panelists predict cost-efficiencies, improved monetization, and greater content personalization By Ken Kerschbaumer Thursday, November 3, 2022 - 9:18 am
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Three of the big topics of the day - the cloud, AI, and automated production - and how they are coming together and transforming the nature of sports-content creation and distribution were the subject of a panel discussion last week at SPORTEL, the annual event held in Monaco that brings together key rightsholders, technology providers, and decision-makers.
From left: David Candler, senior director, customer solutions, Veritone; Julie Souza, head of sports, AWS Professional Services; Brian Phillpotts, business development, sport governing bodies, Pixellot; and Ken Kerschbaumer, editorial director, SVG, discussed the future of AI, the cloud, and automated production at Sportel.
The companies represented were AWS, arguably the global leader in cloud services; Veritone, whose aiWARE operating system for AI powers
Digital Media Hub for new content-management and -monetization models; and Pixellot, whose automated production technology offers smaller federations and broadcasters a chance to power production in new ways.
Nobody calls and says, We want to use the cloud,' said Julie Souza, head of sports, AWS Professional Services. It's Hey, we have a business problem, like trying to get better insight so we can draft better or perform better or make our venues more sustainable.' At Amazon, we like to work backwards from that and dive into the business use cases. What are you trying to solve? What are we trying to optimize? Then we start thinking about how to do that.
Often, she continued, it's not just our technologies. We work with our partners and bring those technologies to bear as we're somewhat agnostic and really focused on delivering business outcomes.
Souza said AWS is focused on five pillars when it comes to sports organizations: sports data for on-field performance; virtualizing production; smart venues with sustainable connectivity; improving the fan experience; and customer- and fan-data analytics to help with marketing and commercial needs.
Those are the big ones, she said, but we are dabbling in others as well.
Brian Phillpotts, business development, sport governing bodies, Pixellot, said his company produces 160,000 live matches across 72 countries with 27,000 systems across 18 sports. And many of those events are produced with zero staff once the initial setup is complete.
Once the cameras are set up, he said, there is someone who goes into the content-management system and schedules the time of the event and the type of sport algorithm that needs to be triggered. Our sweet spot is Tier 3 or Tier 4 single-camera productions, and, currently, the workflows are either all automated or all traditional.
There is, however, growing demand for putting those automated camera outputs into traditional broadcasts. For example, in Italy, both Sky Italia and DAZN are taking output from an automated tactical camera that has been deployed league-wide by Italy's Serie A.
It's a 50-fps camera that is being fed into the main production so automated production is starting to move from here to there, he added.
That hybrid of automated and non-automated production is being matched on the cloud side with a hybrid world of private and public cloud. From the AWS perspective, the goal is to use public-cloud servers that maximize utilization, ultimately driving down costs.
All the equipment is being handled and managed by AWS, and the user is on a consumption basis, explained Souza. It all goes back to hardware not being utilized and optimizing it on AWS servers in the public cloud. It's a reality that big shows could be done in the cloud. We've been doing a lot of great proof of concepts side by side with a normal production using hardware. And it's working.
One important aspect of the move to the cloud is the ability to provision content and give rightsholders (and others) access to content without the need for manual intervention, copying of files, etc. The cloud can bring together video, audio, data, AI engines to identify content and open up a new world of benefits for content owner and rightsholder alike, according to David Candler, senior director, customer solutions, Veritone.
It's all about using AI to create operational efficiencies all along the supply chain and, most important, create new monetization revenue avenues, he said. We've been working with the USTA at the US Open for many years and make the archive accessible during the live event, as well as capturing new content on premises and pushing it to the cloud. We're using things like EVS IPDirector to capture live content and post it into our Digital Media Hub, which is cloud-native. And there are many global stakeholders who need content from the event, like press associations, broadcasters, sponsor, teams, and so on.
The cloud is leading to more-creative and -timely content because a rightsholder can access the system and pull out a clip from long ago that may suddenly become relevant - for example, when a player like Serena Williams winds up her career.
A sponsor like Rolex may want to see all the aces by Rafa Nadal with a Rolex logo in the background, said Candler, so we'll use structured data to find the ace and then use face and logo recognition to complete the picture.
Veritone also provides Veritone Voice (lifelike AI-powered voice cloning) that can open up new opportunities for advertising, marketing, commentary, or script reads. The system requires three hours of professional-quality audio recordings to be ingested, and then the voice clone c
