It is tough out there for small sports broadcasters.
They happen to find themselves between two sides competing for the attention of the sports fans while being tremendously limited in their resources to deliver high-quality sports content.
Yet they remain pretty popular amongst both the viewers and participants. For instance, a game of High-School Football can bring in as much as 300 000 viewers, and in those schools almost 57% of students play some kind of sports.
So, we won’t let the kids down. We know how the folks can gain an advantage with an automated video content analysis. Let us explain.
Competition on both fronts
Producing and sharing sports content continuously is much easier when you have the resources. But the situation is different for those operating on a smaller scale, say smaller TV outlets, starting web-platforms, or school/college sports leagues.
The problem is that they have a much less exciting budget to dedicate to content production so that it would match the quality of the big boys.
Let me tell ya: all of those camera arrays, studios, and camera crews are not cheap.
Also, have less anticipated type of competition for the fans’ attention — the fans themselves, as platforms like TikTok or Instagram allow them to quickly record the action on their phone and put it out online.
So, we got bigger leagues beating smaller ones in terms of content quality, and fans beating them in terms of delivery.
Obviously, outspending both of them is not an option in that case. Which means smaller leagues need a way to increase the production quality while making sure they do it faster than a fan wiping Doritos crumbs off their fingers and reaching for their phone.
Cutting sports highlights with AI tools
Any type of production has tasks that are creative and those that are more of a tedious work than anything else.
Producing a whole sports broadcast is a very involved process, nobody argues that. You need your cameras, and a crew, and a good producer. But there are also some less creatively impressive tasks that those people do — like cutting highlight compilations.
And you absolutely can automate those types of tasks with strong AI algorithms. Automation provides a healthy mix of consistent content quality and decrease in production time.
Let’s take the highlights case as an example.
Using automation from CognitiveMill™, it is very easy to capture the best moments of the game and quickly share it on social media for everybody to enjoy. You can push the most outrageous touchdowns to TikTok even during the game, or put out the whole compilation of highlights on your YouTube channel after the fact.
Recap the event and let the potential viewers peek into the game — maybe they’ll like and become your viewers, who knows?
But first things first, you have to get your automated highlight generation workflow going. Here’s how you can do it.
All you need is to implement sports highlights software into your production cycle, and then just… kick back.
CognitiveMill™ uses complex technology to analyze the game footage, picking on the most important moments. It carefully studies the visuals, dissecting each and every frame, and tries to figure out the context of whatever’s happening in the video.
It enables the software to find scenes relevant to a customizable inquiry from a user, i.e. you can have it pull the most dramatic moments, scores, funny comments from casters, fans reactions, and so on.
Then it can cut them and edit into a cohesive compilation ready for sharing on the platform of your choosing.
Efficiency at the core of automated highlights generator
One of the most important things for a smaller sports league is the utmost efficiency of the production.
Well, it is important for any broadcaster, but you know what I mean, right? Smaller guys don’t have the means to slack off here and there, so they need to make sure they’re operating as efficiently as possible.
Which is where automation takes the cake — with its video analysis capabilities, it can produce sports highlights almost 50 times faster than a human editor would.
Just imagine: all of those hours in front of the monitor erased with a single stroke. You get your content out faster, your editors get the chance to focus on more creatively engaging content.
Another important factor is the accuracy of the analysis. Not only does the sports highlights generator do its job quickly, but it also avoids mistakes, which would cause you more time in the editing room.
So now you have more tedious tasks performed by AI with incredible speed, and your creators have more time and energy to dedicate towards more demanding tasks. Seems like a win-win to me.
Summing up
Sports leagues operating on a smaller scale often face budgetary constraints, which makes them unable to keep up with the quality of production the audience has come to expect.
In order to chase after their piece of a broadcasting pie, the leagues have to find a way to keep their cost and operation as efficient as possible while upping the production quality.
Which means they would greatly benefit from automation of a portion of their content production — for instance, sports highlights generation. Implementing a software that would automatically analyze the sporting event footage and create a best moments compilation can help leagues slash the production costs and increase the rate at which they put out new content.
Bio
Oleg Gubin — CEO and founder of AIHunters. AIHunters applies cognitive science and top-shelf AI/ML/CV tech to optimize video analytics for media companies, streamlining the way they create and manage video content.
