Gothia and Partille Cups: AI skyrockets production of niche youth sport streaming

Every summer, youth sports players flock to Gothenburg, Sweden, to take part in football’s Gothia Cup and the Partille World Cup handball tournament. Over the past three years, the OTT production, distribution and delivery of thousands of live matches have exploded across both tournaments, managed by a core team that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with the support of innovative AI-driven and automated technology.

The ability to deliver live broadcast-quality footage of thousands of matches to fans in a sustained manner really took off post-pandemic with the help of increasingly mature AI technology, according to John Kihlström, live streaming project leader at the Gothia Cup and Partille World Cup.

“In 2017, we filmed the Gothia Cup from 25 fields with the support of around 80 young people filming from atop 3m hunting towers, which came with a lot of human error,” recalls Kihlström. “We decided to turn towards a first iteration of AI-assisted cameras in 2019, but this technology did not deliver. We then faced two years of cancellation due to COVID-19, which gave us the time to rethink our approach. Upon our return, we got in touch with Spiideo, a Swedish cloud-based video recording and analysis solution that had a great reputation. We never looked back.”

In 2022, a combination of Spiideo’s automated cameras, Wowza’s OTT technology and the Cup Manager tournament system allowed for a new beginning, and the delivery of live footage from games on 64 fields for the Gothia Cup and 59 courts for the Partille World Cup. “We have been growing ever since,” says Kihlström. “Currently, around 65% of Gothia Cup matches and just over 80% of Partille World Cup matches are broadcast to a dedicated app and website, with a three-minute delay. Any event that is not covered by cameras is live reported online via the Cup Manager scheduling and result system, which referees can update live from the field using a cell phone.”

The integration of these technologies streamlines all operations during the tournaments, according to Fredrik Fredrik Löfgren, team lead EMEA and UK&I at Spiideo. “Scheduling is integrated from the tournament Cup Manager scheduling platform to Spiideo. All planned games also get a broadcast planned in Spiideo Play, with all applicable metadata. Game events are automatically imported from the live report, either directly from the referees tech, or from a representative from each field, resulting in fully automated in-game graphics.”

This year, around 3,000 matches were broadcast in a single week for the Gothia Cup alone. Each game comes with automated highlights, thanks to Spiideo’s cameras and their fully in-house Autofollow feature.

“Our Autofollow is sport specific,” explains Löfgren. “This means it has unique logic for the Gothia Cup football tournament, the Partille World Cup handball tournament, as well as the Gothia Cup floorball tournament that runs in the winter. We use recorded games and apply machine learning to the data to improve its performance, so the AI algorithm improves over time.”

The ability for a very small team to produce high broadcast quality is one of the unique features of this operation, according to Löfgren. “There is also the possibility to increase the broadcast quality on selected games in a number of ways,” he says. “By adding commentary to selected streams, by using multi-angle from selected venues or selected games and by using ingestion, perhaps through bringing additional manually produced video feeds into the production, to really capture emotions for example.”

Next year, Kihlström hopes to live stream all Partille World Cup games, but the Gothia Cup will take longer. “We must cover around 120 fields in and around Gothenberg, so that might take a couple more years. Coverage is dependent on the availability of electricity and network. We use a 5G solution which works well, but outside Gothenberg the network can be unreliable.”

AI and automation have been central to the speed and scale at which coverage of these tournaments have grown. “Our goal is to live stream 10 more fields every year. Without this technology, we might have been limited to filming from perhaps 40 fields. The arrival of the 6G network will make things easier still.”

The audience has welcomed this extended coverage and viewer numbers have steadily increased. “We have built up a trust for our broadcasts, with few problems so far,” said Kihlström. “What Spiideo, Cup Manager and Wowza have delivered together for our tournaments is fantastic. And now thanks to us, other tournaments are now also benefitting from this integrated solution.”