3 Key Themes from the Sports Content Management Forum
Ryan Murphy
I think a lot of people take for granted the availability and production of live television. Live television broadcasts have been in the US for about 75 years now, and the behind-the-scenes production of live events are overlooked by those outside the industry.
At the Sport Video Group’s Sports Content Management Forum, hosted at the 230 5th Avenue Penthouse in New York City on July 26th, I had the opportunity to learn from professionals in sports video broadcasting about the work that goes into the creation of live productions.
As an individual who works in digital asset management it was fantastic to learn from diverse organizations and individuals from Fox Sports, the NHL, Dalet Media Asset Manager, and many more.
Here are my three key themes I heard at the conference.
1. User First
Users in this context are the editors who are clipping and posting content to the public.
The necessity to make live sporting event content available to producers around the globe, which was accelerated by the pandemic, has forced teams to come up with creative and efficient ways to share content.
Whether the topic was rights management, cloud storage, or artificial intelligence, the speakers consistently came back to one question: What do our users want to see?
My favorite term about this topic that popped up was the “Portalization” of media asset management. Everybody is looking to set up new portals with permissions and asset accessibility to serve a wide variety of use cases
For example, Keifer O’Connor of the PGA talked about the need to establish portals for broadcast teams in the US, International Teams, and even rules officials looking to validate scoring. These portals also help drive business and artistic decisions. Keifer discussed the analytics they are looking at on the Portals to understand which markets are looking at types and styles of content from their library.
Stefan Guez, Co-Founder of Dalet, harped on the importance of simplifying the complexities of Media Asset Management (MAM) for users. If you can hide the complexity of delivering media assets, it frees up the ability for users to focus on their craft.
2. Interoperability
Interoperability in this context means the ability to smoothly move content from live broadcasting to local or cloud storage, and out to the many different platforms where users edit, finalize, and serve content to their fans.
As teams are looking to connect these systems, they are relying on consistent metadata to be tagged and utilized to inform the automation and connection between technology.
In terms of metadata, Paul Kelly of the Canadian Press and IPTC gave the attendees an overview of the new sports schema his team is working on at IPTC. The ontology he and his team are creating is an intelligent and informed web of data that can describe almost any major sporting event in the world in an easily readable format. You can check out more at sportschema.org
By implementing a standard like the IPTC sports schema, leagues and teams will be able to work with broadcasters more seamlessly as the world of rights management continues to become murkier. Implementing that standard is another project all together…
3. Artificial Intelligence
Thank you for reading the title of this third section and not immediately closing the post.
Although we are all experiencing some form of AI fatigue at the moment, the speakers at the conference were honest and realistic in their approaches to artificial intelligence.
Here’s a quick takeaway. AI could replace:
Logging
Metadata Tagging
Content distribution
What it won’t replace is the artistic and stylistic direction of the humans behind the cameras.
Hugo Gaggioni, CTO for Sony Electronics, was passionate about this topic. He knew that eventually there would be a camera that could point and record a basketball game moving up and down the court. However, that AI won’t be able to catch the angles, emotions, and highlights that truly excite us as sports fans.
To sum it up, the true theme of the entire conference was about connecting. Connecting with users, connecting systems, or utilizing AI to connect with fans more efficiently.
If you’d like to connect with me on asset management and production, please email me at ryan.murphy@saltflatsllc.com