How the NFL Embodies the Gold Standard of Digital Asset Management
Brendan Healy
As the 2023 NFL season concludes with the Superbowl in Las Vegas this weekend, the league will be celebrating one of its most successful seasons yet. This past regular season averaged 17.9 million viewers per game, tied for the second most in a season after the 2015 season, which averaged 18.1 million viewers per game. The NFL also broke ground by airing games exclusively on NBC’s Peacock streaming service for the first time, expanding its list of distribution channels and platforms to nine. While the NFL may not have reached its heyday in terms of viewers, the league’s efforts to grow the game are showing.
One aspect of the NFL’s presence that may be underappreciated is how seamlessly football content is delivered to the fan. The NFL generates enormous amounts of content every weekend and there is a symphony of technology working behind the scenes to get it from the field to the screen. Particularly when it comes to managing photo and video assets, the NFL and its clubs demonstrate best-in-class practices. Here are a few of the ways the NFL is leading the field in this arena:
Rich Metadata
With the sheer amount of media created by the NFL every weekend, it is crucial to have detailed metadata to make those assets findable. The Houston Texans organization, for instance, captures over 10,000 photos a game of players, fans, coaches, cheerleaders, etc., which are uploaded to their Digital Asset Management system, Acquia. To make these assets easily findable for the Texans’ marketing/PR/coaches/etc., team photographers can tag each photo with the vast metadata fields provided in their DAM. Beyond just searching by simple descriptors, DAM users can search by everything from the details of the game (opponent, win/loss, home/away, final score) to the players’ jersey/pants color combo. Users may not always know what imagery they are initially looking for, and having this complete metadata to search by can help them find assets to tell their story.
Impressive Integrations
There is a wealth of data captured during NFL games today, and tying outside data sources to digital assets can make them much more useful. The Las Vegas Raiders media team, for example, can apply metadata to game footage in their Media Asset Management system, Vidispine, through an API connection to NFL’s Next Gen Stats. The NGS data, which captures every aspect of a play through tags in the player’s shoulder pads, is added to the video assets in the MAM, enabling users to granularly search for highlights based on their specific criteria. For instance, rather than searching for “Josh Jacobs, touchdown,” the robust metadata enables requests like “Josh Jacobs touchdown, wheel route, vs. Cover 2 defense, 4th quarter.”
Seamless Distribution
After assets are made easily findable in the DAM/MAM, the next challenge is getting those assets to the end users, like players who want to post images on their social media. Since 2017, the NFL has run a Live Content Correspondent program, which adds a network of photographers and videographers at all NFL events to capture content for the league, its clubs, and its players. After this content is captured, NFL Media then utilizes the Socialie integration in its DAM, Photoshelter, to push that content directly to a player or social media team. This workflow avoids reuploading or retagging assets, and utilizes metadata tags to automatically push assets through to the proper teams in Socialie, helping the league’s partners spread NFL content.
These are just a few examples of how the NFL uses strong digital asset management practices to share its content with a hungry fan base. As a former researcher working on the set of DirecTV’s Red Zone channel, I saw firsthand how much data was generated during every play on Sunday, and how efficiently our team worked to turn those clips around for the viewer. None of that could be accomplished without strong data sources and streamlined workflows, which every business can copy from the NFL’s playbook.