SUPPLEMENT
USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO BOOST SPORTS PRODUCTION By Jerome Wauthoz, vice president products, Tedial
T
he rights to major sports command ever higher prices. Broadcasters and media companies who win these rights have to innovate to create new revenue opportunities to pay for them. There are two opportunities. First, the traditional, linear broadcast service has to be ever more engaging. That means more highlights, more replays – more insight in general, keeping the sports fan watching. The second route is by providing clips and packages tailored for other platforms. These can be to serve those who cannot sit down and watch the whole game but still want to keep up to date with the action. But there is also a sizeable majority of viewers – and it is moving towards virtually every viewer – that watch with a smartphone in their hand. They want more insight from the second screen. The pressure is on to create ever more highlights packages, from 30 seconds around a goal being scored to a 30 minute summary of the game for the archive. Some viewers or subscribers might want to watch all the action from their favourite player, a particular game, or maybe a summary of the best goals of the weekend. For craft editors to create all these packages places huge demands on personnel and on equipment, which often needs to be rigged on location. Automating the production of sports highlights would have a huge impact on production costs. Such a system needs to provide intelligent functionality to enrich and act upon metadata. It should assemble and develop metadata from multiple sources, then use it to guide automated clip creation. Finally, it should be able to interpret business rules which determine what to do with the
completed package, whether that is to deliver it to the director or to automatically deliver it across multiple platforms. Enriching the metadata will integrate tags from sports logging specialists, adding it to information already in the database. It should also use artificial intelligence to create additional logging points, for example by using speech to text analysis, using crowd sounds as well as the commentators’ words to judge where the key action starts and finishes. Armed with this rich metadata, the system should then be capable of creating large numbers of clips. The vast majority of these clips should be created through automated decision making. For example, where a clip is based on the live output, it should look at the video feed to minimise visual jarring. The AI edit functionality must ensure that these automatically generated clips are highly polished and ready to go. Should a clip need to go to a craft editor – and this should be a very small minority – then the timeline should be loaded with the automatically generated edit, and each clip given a descriptive name so the editor does not need to waste time working out what clip is what. Once complete, the clips can be offered to the director, or pushed to social networks or digital platforms, with the appropriate branding and metadata mapping. Tedial has developed a solution for automatic sports clip creation, SMARTLIVE. Built on open standards, it is agnostic to the equipment around it and can be added to any production infrastructure. It can be implemented on premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid. As sports rights become ever more expensive and fans expect more insight and more analysis, using an AI enabled asset
management and production system is the most comprehensive, most productive way to create additional content, satisfying consumers and increasing revenue opportunities without increasing human and resource costs. n
TVBEUROPE NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2018 | V
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