International Paralympic Committee signs up with Egoli Media for AI-enabled content management

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has signed a deal with Egoli Media that will see AI-enabled technology used to manage its sporting archive, a move that the governing body hopes will allow it to better utilise and monetise its content.

The partnership will see Egoli Media use proprietary AI software to digitise and automatically log, tag and categorise all IPC-owned content, which it is said will enable better and faster access to footage from previous and future Paralympic Games, as well as other major Para sport events.

The AI technology will be able to analyse and tag Paralympic content frame by frame to create an organised, data-rich library and personalised search experience, catalogued to identify Para athletes, places, actions and brands. It can also analyse Paralympic sport-specific features, such as searching athletes according to the classification system.

The agreement lasts until December 2024 and will see over 8,000 hours of taped footage from the 1992 Paralympic Games onwards digitised and catalogued for the first time.

“With so much video content being created every day, the challenge of organising it and realising its value has become overwhelming for content creators and rights holders.”

Commenting on the new partnership, Alexis Schäfer, commercial, partnerships and broadcasting director of the IPC, 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 that can do that job and more, as 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.”

He continued: “[This] 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 partners 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 minutes.

“The Egoli platform will offer us a lot of new opportunities, from the ability to commercialise content to making it easier to create storyboards that we or our partners can post on our digital channels. For us, this new partnership is an important milestone in our digital innovation journey.”

World Para Sports championships, associated photography and reports will also be included in the repository along with up to 1,500 hours of live broadcast World Feeds and non-televised footage from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games.

Footage will be made available for licensing and download by stakeholders and interested parties via a management library, alongside crowd celebrations, medal ceremonies, in-stadium coverage, outside competition footage and more.

The founder and chief executive of Egoli Media, Caroline Rowland, said: “With so much video content being created every day, the challenge of organising it and realising its value has become overwhelming for content creators and rights holders. The only way to access its value, is to make content searchable at a granular level.

“Our proprietary and ground-breaking AI means that 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.

For an initial period of four years, the partnership will see Egoli Media provide:

• Live annotation services at the Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022 and Paris 2024 Paralympic Games
• People recognition for Paralympic athletes from 1992 to 2024
• Training of action, object and TV graphic recognition across all 28 sports
• Definition of tags for all 28 Egoli Paralympic models
• Inventory of all brands and logos featured from 1992 to 2024
• Integration into the egoli Insight tool providing full access to video and statistics through a single user interface
• The digitisation of tapes and upload of digital content to secure and structured cloud storage
• The creation of a Media Asset Management (MAM) system