A new partnership agreement has been announced between Grabyo and Opta Sports to make the creation, management and distribution of soccer highlights automated for broadcasters and publishers.
The deal sees Grabyo, a cloud-based video production, editing and distribution platform, integrating real-time data from Opta Sports, one of the most respected sports data companies in the world.
It means that Grabyo users will be able to rely on automated video clips from soccer games that are triggered by “events” such as a goal, save, penalty decision or red card. The platform uses Opta Sports data to find these moments and then automatically clips the content, in real-time, ready for distribution moments after the event, across a host of channels.
As Grabyo currently counts La Liga and BT Sport as partners and in 2016, it generated over two billion video views for its roster of clients.
In an interview, Grabyo CEO Gareth Capon outlined how the deal between the two companies is significant for the industry.
With this partnership, he said: “We’ve done this deal with Opta Sports to make it easier for our partners to be able to create those events automatically without any human input. We are building a much more robust broadcast-quality platform and see this as a start of a process to give broadcasters and publishers the ability to manage and distribute content across a whole range of platforms, we’re going to make it very easy for you to do that. Having partners like Opta Sports, is important for that process.”
“We’ve now created a system that saves those assets automatically and are available in real-time and you can choose where you want to publish them. You can give one person the power of potentially five or six because the algorithm is using the data to create those assets automatically rather than somebody having to specifically create them themselves.”
“In essence, we’ve taken same workflow and process that a digital user of Grabyo would be used to, but instead of having to create a live moment yourself, you can schedule an event yourself for an event in the future.”
He cited last night’s Man City Champions League game as an example, saying once a game is scheduled, “it is on the system.”
He detailed that “as soon as user goes into Grabyo, a live feed is received from Opta, it automatically triggers an editing event and we cut that clip and make it available to users automatically.” This means that a user can see these clips appearing, in real-time, as a game progresses.
Capon further outlined the ease of use for this automatic system. “Once you’ve set it up once, it is very simple to replicate, you can schedule all the Champions League games for the rest of the season all now and Grabyo would just starting working in the background.”
There is also an additional feature whereby Grabyo is able to save a game to its cloud-based infrastructure and even if a user hasn’t set the automated feature, they can retroactively go back into a game and pull clips from a specific game.
However, Capon also stressed that despite the huge level of automation, that it “isn’t a fully automated system and that is by design, because you might want to define what the asset is, before sharing with your audience.”
The benefits of such an automated approach are numerous in his opinion. “This speeds up workflow and improves the efficiency of this workflow too. Imagine you are covering all eight Champions League games running concurrently, if you’re a broadcaster and you’ve got a digital team covering all those games, it may be quite hard to get all those moments to distribute across all of your digital platforms.”
Regarding how the deal came about, as detailed by Capon in the interview, Grabyo had some significant links within the Perform Group, which acquired Opta Sports in 2013 for $52 million, to get the deal done.
“We’ve worked with the Perform Group over the last year or so, so we’ve got a good working relationship. Two of our investors are also involved in Perform too, so there’s a corporate background to this.”
“About six months ago, we start to build the plans for how we automated production on our platform. Due to our relationship with Perform Group, we set up a series of meetings with Opta Sport and said, ‘Look, we have these plans to use data intelligently, you’re one of the primary sports data providers in the world.’ It was a great fit. We knew that football was the first sport we wanted to start with, because of existing customer base and also as it is one of the biggest and most popular sports on the planet. It opens up a whole range of broadcasting and publisher partners.”
When asked about what the future of Grabyo would be, following this partnership, Capon said: “This is the first of a range of data-led enhancements to our platform. We’ve started with soccer but there are many more sports that we want to serve and that we will serve with this relationship”.
He revealed that a future feature will to be introduced on the platform will be speech detection translation, based off artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “Every spoken word in a stream of content could be layered against, a searchable stream, which will be fantastically valuable.” He cited the example of how this technology could be used to easily find every time that FC Barcelona star Lionel Messi is mentioned in audio during a 30-day period that Grabyo can go and find every piece of relevant content.
Regarding what the company as a whole is seeking to achieve, he said, “We’re building a suite of tools for editors, producers, content creators, production teams to be able to help them manage, edit, distribute their videos through a range of digital platforms, more efficiently, and often in a more automated, cost efficient manner. All of this production previously, you needed big expensive hardware-based, inflexible systems. We’re looking at that and seeing how much can we build based off software.
“All of these tools we are building that are making it easier for digital teams to have more of the capabilities of a traditional, typical production broadcast team.”
