Aug 20, 2016; Kennesaw, GA, USA; Denver Outlaws XXX against the Ohio Machine in the first half of the Major League Lacrosse Championship game at Fifth Third Bank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Brett Davis
For Major League Lacrosse, its newest technology partnership around clipping game highlights in real-time has a humans versus debate element to it with how the latter could effectively replace the former or eliminate some of their responsibilities altogether.
The league on Wednesday announced its work with Reely, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup and content platform that combines artificial intelligence and computer vision technology to automatically clip, edit and share sports highlights.
Cullen Gallagher, Reely Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, said MLL was the company’s No. 1 target because of its propensity for being “tech-first” and the sheer size of the league which would hopefully expedite the conversation flow.
While Reely may sound similar to cloud-based live video platform SnappyTV, the key difference with Reely is the automated clipping process. The speed of the lacrosse game, quick-hitting nature of highlights and the sheer volume of goals in the MLL (28/game) doesn’t allow much time to manually process everything that is happening in-game and then rapidly churn out content, as MLL Content Marketing Specialist Dan Ventresca explained. Now, upwards of five staffers could be cutting highlights with SnappyVT, but optimistically when Reely is in full effect, that could shrink to just one person, according to Ventresca.
“Anything that saves a couple hours of your day is of enormous value,” Ventresca said.
“We were thinking, ‘OK, well we have something similar to this right now. There’s potential with Reely that goes above and beyond what we already have.’ All professional sports leagues want to be on the cutting edge of technology as much as possible…Leagues want to utilize the technology that’s available to them. We saw this as an opportunity to make the league better.”
Gallagher preferred to call the AI software “augmentation versus automation, although we are automating some processes,” saying that it will free up people at the league office to focus on other areas.
He said Reely algorithms function on broadcast feeds right now without the need for special cameras or equipment. The software understands the volume of the announcers separately from the crowd and recognizes basic information such as the data on the scoreboard, time and what period or quarter a game is in. Based on the field lines, Reely knows what type of surface it is examining as well.
Gallagher broke it down further in laymen’s terms for how Reely, which received investment from St. Louis-based sports business accelerator Stadia Ventures, could clip and edit a highlight, which can then be shared across web and social media for the MLL and team channels.
For capturing goal highlights, he said the software can identify when plays are happening on a certain end of the field, taking into consideration fans and announcers’ volume along with slow-motion replay and when the scoreboard flips over. It can track when a ball hits the back of a lacrosse net, too.
It sees all of these actions as important events, according to Gallagher, even stating that he and his staff can train the software to recognize important plays versus non-important plays and give them a 1 to 10 rating. For example, he gave the analogy that a first quarter free throw during a basketball game would be a 1 or 2 while a buzzer-beater game-winning shot would be a 10.
The MLL’s Ventresca said eventually tracking statistics beyond just clipping highlights and linking players to a specific goal to generate live box scores is a potential software use that also gained the league’s attention.
Ventresca and his staff provided the company with game tape from last year so it could become familiar with lacrosse, a sport that Reely is attempting to master first before expanding to others. As Ventresca described, Reely told the MLL that if it could perfect lacrosse given the pace of play, fluid nature of highlights and rapid-fire goals, it could work with any sport.
The MLL and Reely will test run the software alongside SnappyTV during the Ohio Machine-Atlanta Blaze matchup on Saturday, with the eventual goal to fully move to the automated system.
“The game moves so fast. If there’s a way to make that more efficient and accurate, that’d be fantastic for us,” Gallagher said.
“We are 100 percent focused on creating the best automated highlight solution for sports.”
He added that Reely is geared towards the professional ranks for now but eventually there are plans to expand to high school and youth levels.
