Archiving Italian football
Following a decisive agreement with the Italian Football League, Lega Calcio, and with the assistance of Prevideo-Mediadesign, Infront Sports & Media recently implemented the management of the Italian historical football archive at its Milan facility.
It is definitively something important from many different points of view since, if we do not consider all partial archives belonging to national broadcasters like Mediaset, RAI, SKY and the very few who acquired the sports TV rights in the latest years, such a huge archiving and retrieving system, well organized and structured on soccer, was really missing.
Operative since last Spring, it now boasts around five Italian football seasons and on several storage formats and they are still striving to gather all possible materials concerning A and B soccer championships. This important development was created in cooperation between Infront Group technical staff and Prevideo-Mediadesign, a well known Italian full contractor which has been specializing on broadcast and post technical facilities creation and support, at the doors of Milan, for the last 30 years and over.
The new modern archiving system is available for a plethora of possible users, Series A Soccer Clubs, among which many have their TV stations, international customers (since Italian soccer season is very popular among many foreign countries and continents, Asia, North and South America, EMEA, etc), it is available on the Internet, for all TV stations for the so called “diritto di cronaca” (every broadcaster may insert up to a few minutes of such material for free in their news programs) and whoever might request it on subscription today and in the future.
The archiving system creates all highlights (4/5 minutes) used by all commercial stations, but the majors which own the official sports rights, for many sports news and bulletins and all weekly broadcasts dealing with soccer, typically talk shows.
The whole system was thought over and designed for over a year and a half before starting with the creation of the technical project because this sector apparently offers and incredible number of similar systems all up to the task. But examining the requests of the customer, the incredible complexity, exigence of reliability, speed, scalability and the long figures of other needs, the list of potential suppliers reduced drastically. Besides it was certainly not a system just to implement, use and forget: it needed to be followed carefully after sale to grow according to all needs, and constantly updated. So the choice of the technical hardware and software was secondary in respect of the choice of all functions is had to perform, and it was to be found a technical partner instead of a simple “system seller”. So Infront and Prevideo-Mediadesign together made their choice with Harris and IPV. We are coming back with more technical details asap.