IBC 2017: Grabyo, Opta Sports team up to create automated sports clips for social platforms, OTT

The rise of social video and mobile viewing has increased the focus on the speed of production for clips, highlights and video content. To meet this challenge for digital publishers, Opta Sports and Grabyo have partnered to deliver automated clip creation for live football matches.
Across the media industry, data manipulation, computer vision, machine learning and automated processes are becoming more prevalent in content production workflows. For digital and social content teams, automated technology gives them the ability to publish content from multiple events, locations and streams and share with fans across digital platforms in real-time.

For broadcasters, this provides the digital teams with autonomy from their TV counterparts, ensuring clips from all properties can be created and distributed instantly – allowing fans to experience content ‘in the moment’ regardless of on-site production support or geographical location. Automation enhances the experience for fans, giving producers more time to optimize videos for social and mobile viewing, or craft messages to tell the stories behind the game.

Automated workflows have begun to emerge for professional sports production. IBM’s Watson cognitive computer technology has dramatically altered content production and discovery for tennis tournaments including The Championships at Wimbledon and the US Open. The technology was used to automatically identify the best moments in key matches and auto-generate highlights from both events this year.

Grabyo will ingest real-time data from Opta Sports to create a data-driven production workflow capable of creating video clips from triggered events such as a goal, save, penalty decision or red card. Any key talking point in a match that is logged by Opta Sports can be automatically clipped, ready for distribution. Videos can be created in real-time from live games or accessed from any previous game streamed through the Grabyo platform which is saved as a VOD asset.

Using Grabyo’s existing cloud-based video tools, these clips and highlights can be reformatted for social and digital distribution – such as square or vertical orientation, or with additional graphics and captions – and shared to multiple platforms.

“By partnering with Opta Sports, Grabyo is able to provide our customers with the ability to share key moments in an instant without the need for an editor or producer to sit watching every moment of every game,” says Gareth Capon, CEO of Grabyo. “We have seen strong demand for the integration of live data feeds and computer vision technology to create automated workflows. This first release of our data-driven capabilities builds a solid foundation to ensure Grabyo partners can deliver content at scale to their fast-growing digital audiences.”

The new technology provides broadcasters and rights holders with access to clips seconds after the event has happened, or builds an entire library of game highlights instantly after the final whistle. By having the freedom to select the events which trigger automation, and setting rules for clip length, format and publishing, production teams remain in control of their video output and storytelling.

 “Opta Sports’ expertise in collecting, tagging and distributing the best sports data available has been a staple of sports broadcasters’ output for many years,” says Adam Bowley, Head of Broadcast Services at Opta Sports. “In many cases, we are best known for powering on-screen presentation graphics and providing leading editorial services before, during, and after matches. Opta Sports’ unique services can also help increase production efficiencies and reduce costs, which can be just as important to broadcasters in today’s climate. By partnering with Grabyo we are assured that our data will be handled in the best way to support our clients’ demands, and increase fan engagement, which is key to our success.”