Before, during and after: Managing the content explosion in sports according to Signiant
By Scott Carroll, Signiant senior manager, marketing and communications.
When we think about sports production, we generally think about the ‘live’ action. However, today’s sports broadcasts leverage an enormous volume of file-based content before, during and after the game. The amount of file-based content used is growing as fast as the number of places that content needs to go.
Today, sports productions use more cameras (120-plus cameras at some events!) with higher resolutions than ever before. In addition, there are more viewing platforms, global rights holders, and far more screens at the stadiums. Distributed production teams work across multiple locations with content stored in multiple places: on-prem, in and across the cloud.
Social media, player brand building, legalised betting, direct-to-consumer offerings, and historical archive requests add to the need for more content to move and be moved to a far greater number of destinations.
Before the game
Prior to the live action, an enormous volume of content must be delivered to the production site. At Super Bowl XVI at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, a staggering 1.2 petabytes of prerecorded footage was ingested on-site before the game. This is a time-sensitive operation as these large and mission critical datasets must be on site before the broadcast begins. Pregame file packages include prerecorded interviews, team and player featurettes, highlights from previous games, graphics packages, pre-produced game-specific package roll-ins and more.
During the game
With the growing amount of content being created during the game and with distributed teams working to meet deadlines that are measured in seconds, there is a tremendous amount of file movement while the game is in progress. During the game, file packages include highlight clips remotely created and delivered back to the production site for playout, processed video clips for in-venue displays, clips for remote referee adjudication based across the country, and contractual media obligations for news organizations, social media platforms and rights holders worldwide.
After the game
Immediately following the game, shutting the site down and getting all the footage off-site and into archive quickly saves time and money. The faster production can strike down, the more it can save on rentals and staff hours. After shutdown, all that content continues to drive value in new ways and there are more and more content requests in the days, weeks, and even years that follow. After the game, file packages include any footage needing to be archived into on-prem storage, to the cloud, or both, league distribution obligations to the teams (game film on the next opponent), post-game interviews, highlights and content requests, players and influencers looking for specific clips to build their personal brands and engage their audiences.
Building with the right sized blocks
To meet the live sports content explosion, professional sports teams today turn to product-size SaaS technology that is simple and can be readily deployed as components of larger workflows. This is the key. With web services and modern APIs, these products easily connect to address specific requirements and can be readily swapped out as technology evolves, without disrupting the entire workflow or technology stack. The customer is rewarded with much faster time-to-value while maintaining agility and favorable economics.
Considerations for moving sports media assets
For sports professionals working with extremely large file sizes, highly valuable assets and time-sensitive collaborative projects, standard web-based file-sharing tools have numerous technical and security issues that can be challenging to manage. Vital capabilities for live sports production and collaboration file transfer software solutions are detailed below.
Speeding up
Live sports production is a high pressure environment where masses of content are moved as quickly as possible to meet extremely tight deadlines. While some solutions offer the potential, many lack the core file acceleration capabilities that makes them convenient, or useful at all. Your team shouldn’t have to fear that the files they just sent will take longer than necessary to reach the next person who needs them right now. Look for acceleration and multi-Gbps transfer rates into, out of, and between S3 buckets, even in the presence of latency and congestion.
Reliabile transport
Your files must be delivered unaltered, with byte-for-byte accuracy. Imagine you’ve just finished your edits and midway through your file transfer, the connection is interrupted, forcing you to start all over again. This is why checkpoint restart, the ability to automatically restart an interrupted transfer from the point of failure, is essential. Checkpoint restart simply continues your transfer from where it left off.
Security time
Security is the most predominant feature a file-sharing solution should possess. In recent years, major media organizations have suffered massive security breaches. The need for defense-in-depth security in any solution allows you to indulge in fast file delivery while ensuring no unauthorised access occurs. Look for a file transfer solution that is highly secure by design and trusted by most of the world’s top media enterprises.
Control and visibility
Admins, operations personnel, producers, editors, and IT professionals working on a live sports production can be spread out far and wide. The ecosystem must not devolve into chaos. You must control and see who accessed any file while informing all necessary constituents. Intuitive, easy-to-manage, centralised administrative features are fundamental to ensuring consistent file transfer success. Without an easy, web-based solution, things will get messy quickly.
Lastly simplicity
Lastly, a simple UI for centralised administration access and easy onboarding minimises the time needed for new team members to ramp up and ensures a smooth operation. A cloud-native implementation means no need to procure or manage any cloud infrastructure. Look for a file transfer software provider who will monitor your system 24/7.
As live sports production content explosion continues, choosing the right file transfer software will help you and your team manage all that content and be in a better place to harness new business opportunities.