T3Media Inks Deal With U.S. Soccer Fed Just in Time for London Games

The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s run at the London 2012 Olympics is already under way, the team having played its opener this week before the Games’ Opening Ceremonies even took place. And demand for footage of Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, and Abby Wambach will reach an apex over the coming weeks.

Fortunately for licensees, the U.S. Soccer Federation recently streamlined the footage-licensing process by inking a a deal with T3 Media. The cloud-based video-management- and licensing-services provider is now managing all of the federation’s video assets and has enabled access to its video library through its footage-licensing site, t3licensing.com.

“The U.S. national teams obviously get a lot of attention come World Cup or Olympics, so a lot of corporate sponsors are looking to obtain footage for their needs,” says Sal Siino, chief content officer, T3Media. “[U.S. Soccer Federation] content is incredibly valuable from that standpoint. You have the corporate sponsors of the national team and the individual player endorsement deals looking to capitalize on this [Olympics hype] with U.S. Soccer footage.”

The U.S. Soccer Collection, which is available exclusively through t3licensing.com, features footage of the national team’s current star players, as well full-length broadcasts, fully produced highlights, behind-the-scenes footage, and stadium establishing shots from U.S.-based international friendlies and home FIFA World Cup Qualifying matches.

T3Media is in the process of ingesting and assigning sophisticated metadata to decades worth of U.S. soccer footage in order to build out the U.S. Soccer Collection. T3 has already digitized, ingested, and assigned metadata to more than 1,500 clips and more than 100 full games — and that number continues to increase every day.

“From the standpoint of accessing their own archives for internal use and creating a platform where their content is more usable for upcoming initiatives, this is an integral part of the process,” says Siino. “Then, once they have ‘smart content’ that is assigned with very sophisticated metadata and accessible in a digital format, it lends itself to next-generation applications, which are certainly in the works.”

The partnership, which was announced earlier this month, will allow U.S. Soccer to not only license out valuable footage of the Men’s and Women’s teams but also streamline its in-house production operation and lay the foundation for future digital initiatives.

“Once you have that baseline foundation in terms of the assets with smart content in digital format, there are all kinds of applications that can stem from that down the road,” says Siino. “It creates the foundation to do a lot of different things with their content from a digital standpoint.”

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