Bespoke artificial intelligence (AI) from egoli Media will automatically log, tag and categorise content from previous and future Paralympic Games.
The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) is working with AI company egoli Media to digitise and automatically log, tag and categorise all IPC-owned content, including previous and future Paralympic Games and other major Para sports events.
The partnership runs until the end of 2024 and sees egoli’s AI analyse and tag Paralympic content frame-by-frame to create an organised, data-rich library. Individual Para athletes, places, actions and brands will be recognised and tagged, with the AI also able to analyse Paralympic sport-specific features, such as searching athletes according to the classification system.
More than 8,000 hours of taped footage from the 1992 Paralympic Games onwards will be digitised and catalogued, alongside World Para Sports championships, associated photography and reports.
On top of this, up to 1,500 hours of live broadcast World Feeds and non-televised footage from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games will be annotated and categorised via egoli’s Annotation engine.
Once tagged and catalogued, footage will be made available for licensing and download by stakeholders (including rights-holders and commercial partners) and interested parties via a management library.
Alexis Schäfer, commercial, partnerships and broadcasting director of the International Paralympic Committee, said: “egoli’s AI technology is at the forefront of sports content innovation and we have been impressed by the accuracy and depth their algorithms can capture. Manually logging video content is time-consuming and labour intensive, as every single log is someone pointing at one moment or element in time in that video and putting that information into a log sheet.
“However, now we have AI technology, it unlocks thousands of data points in each event – it’s able to recognise all the brands on screen, it has face recognition to track athletes in a race or match and follow them for the duration of it, and can even tell us if the background stands are empty or full of people cheering.”
Schäfer continues: “egoli Media is going to make content creation so much easier for the IPC and its stakeholders. For example, you would be able to search ‘Johnnie Peacock, 100m, 2016 and any partner’s name’ to see whether it is available on the system and immediately access it – it means a job that might have taken hours can now be completed in minutes.”
Caroline Rowland, founder and CEO, egoli Media, added: “Our proprietary AI means rights holders can now dig deep into their archives as well as the new content they create, to find moments of extraordinary value. Simply put, this means accessing millions of dollars in secondary licensing revenues at a time when the traditional model is coming under huge pressure. We’re delighted to be partnering with the International Paralympic Committee to support them in telling more incredible stories to more people around the world.