cinfo, leading Spanish company in automatic production technologies has participated in the webinar “The Future of Sports Production” organized by the platform Colosseum Sport, an international sports innovation group, based in Tel Aviv (Israel).
The webinar was attended by speakers from important international companies: cinfo, Telefónica, Swisscom, LiveU and Intel Sports. The webinar has served to explain how sports, as we know them, will never be the same. The sports industry has been forced to look for other ways to broadcast its events due to the impact of the COVID-19. Technology has become a key tool to communicate and inform all audiences and points of the planet.
Antonio del Corral, cinfo’s CEO and Founder, showed cinfo’s automated television production product: tiivii. This product, designed for the generation of content and audiovisual production of events in a totally automated manner using Artificial Intelligence, allows the creation from scratch, quickly and easily, of a TV channel to be transmitted on the Internet automatically. “The automatic production will allow a large number of sports events that currently cannot be transmitted due to their price to be produced and enjoyed in a new way. The automatic transmission allows us to watch the match as a spectator would see it on the pitch and, furthermore, it offers us new ways of production such as multi-camera production, with the possibility that the spectator can choose at any time the camera he or she wants to see so as not to miss any detail of what is happening”, Antonio del Corral assured.
Juan Cambeiro, 5G Innovation Manager of Telefónica, stressed that the advantages of 5G, together with a product such as tiivii, make it easier to broadcast sporting events, such as football matches, at a much lower cost. The cost of having to move the people who perform the match, reserve space for the vehicles, and rent communications for that day is solved with remote production systems and a powerful 5G network. Telefónica is already carrying out various success
Fabian Häfliger, Swisscom’s Project Manager Asport, explained the Asport product, a fully automated video production system that, among other things, uses tiivii for the production of some of the most popular sports in Switzerland, including hornussen and skiing. “These new products are not just for clubs and institutions, they are products that create value for all players, media and public, who enjoy the services the most”. He also indicated that “this type of automated broadcasting connects traditional sports that have never been broadcast before with new technologies”.
Ronen Artman, VP Marketing at LiveU detailed that “5G is ready to change live sports productions. This will support high level productions through high bandwidth and low latency, while reducing production costs and event traffic.
Paul Kandel, Head of Strategy at Intel Sports focused on viewer expectations and making their television experience almost like feeling part of the game. Through experiences such as “volumetric video can provide new experiences for fans through interactivity, customisation and unlimited perspectives of the game. For Kandel, “sports broadcasting has reached a tipping point where consumers want the high levels of personalisation and choice that are available on other platforms such as music and streaming video.
* The tiivii project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 954040