Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Taps Dalet Sports Factory for MAM

Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) has chosen Dalet Sports Factory as the end-to-end Media Asset Management (MAM) platform for all content related to its in-house production and television broadcasts for its professional sports teams that include the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Toronto Maple Leafs, National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Toronto Raptors, Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Toronto FC, and the American Hockey League’s (AHL) Toronto Marlies.

Dalet Sports Factory combines a robust MAM platform and workflow engine with built-in Dalet tools that streamline sports production from ingest and logging through broadcasting and archiving. The Dalet MAM content catalog manages media, essence files and metadata across different systems in the organization, storing and tracking contextual sets of associated multimedia of all kinds along with metadata, including time-coded locators. The catalog provides ultimate flexibility with easily customizable metadata schemes to satisfy every type of sports and media organization and make assets available across the entire enterprise – using Dalet tools or existing/new third party business/broadcast systems.

The first phase of the project at MLSE’s Broadcast Centre in Toronto will involve aggregating years worth of existing metadata and critical information from legacy records of the four teams into the centralized Dalet MAM catalog.

“We have a tremendous amount of very valuable and historic content,” said Chris Hebb, senior vice president of Content for MLSE. “Over the years we’ve attempted to manage the content through a document system, but it has been a siloed process, making it difficult to search and find content when we need it. Dalet’s system will centralize our content and organize it in a meaningful way that makes it accessible and easy to distribute across multiple platforms.”

“MLSE owns some incredibly high-profile franchises and we’re excited to be working with them as they generate more exciting programming for their loyal fans,” says Frederic Roux, director of sales, Dalet, US. “We hear all the time about how ‘just the right clip’ can add depth and dimension to sports coverage. Remote crews, in particular, complain about how cumbersome it can be to locate previous game footage for game coverage or half-time shows. With Sports Factory, it is far easier to bring those clips into live or post production. Assets are fully searchable from the centralized catalog; all it takes is a simple browser to search, find and then preview the clip, whether you’re at Air Canada Centre or in a remote truck. The clip can be pushed to an NLE for fast turnarounds. When content is more accessible, it’s more valuable.”

Designed on modern IT capabilities, open standards, and SOA architecture, Dalet Sports Factory is enterprise-ready for high performance in multi-system organizations. The underlying MAM layer unifies different broadcast and business systems to provide a fluid, cohesive workflow. At MLSE, some of the systems, which will be integrated with the Dalet MAM, include EVS XT video servers, DataDirect Network storage, Harris Nexio servers, Rhozet transcoding farm, Avid and Apple Final Cut Pro NLEs. Broadcast consultant and reseller Majortech will assist in the Dalet MAM deployment.