Greenfly +AI Vision powers digital media access for National Hockey League

The National Hockey League’s (NHL’s) Live Social Contributor (LSC) Program brings the excitement of every NHL hockey game to life for fans globally. LSCs are mobile-first correspondents stationed at each arena who capture the rinkside and behind-the-scenes ‘all-access’ content not picked up by broadcast cameras — and captured specifically for digital and social channels. These photos and videos are then delivered to the NHL for publishing.

Picture: NHL

The NHL knew hockey fans wanted to devour all these immersive moments instantly. For that reason, the league’s social media staff aimed to boost LSC content delivery speed and access for its 32 clubs, along with athletes and broadcasters. Fans on social and digital platforms would get more premium content in real time to engage more deeply with their favourite players and teams.

The league put advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology to work, utilising the Greenfly platform to manage the real-time automated analysis and tagging of large volumes of digital videos and photos to identify players and teams in the context of specific types of scenes.

“Every second counts within the NHL’s Live Social Contributor Program. Fans want their content fast. Greenfly’s artificial intelligence tagging features make it possible to route thousands of photos and videos shot by LSCs across 32 arenas directly to the athletes, clubs and broadcast partners who want to publish them in real-time,” said Heidi Browning, chief marketing officer, NHL.

Greenfly was already powering the NHL’s LSC content capture and collection workflows, enabling the creators to seamlessly capture digital media from their cameras or mobile phones and sync them through Greenfly’s mobile app.

At every event, Greenfly automatically sorts and organises hundreds of incoming assets into curated galleries immediately accessible by clubs, players and broadcasters.

Greenfly has brought advanced artificial intelligence analysis and tagging capabilities to this workflow at the upload stage. Its +AI Vision analyses the contents of every LSC-captured video and photo and identifies the subject(s) — such as players, using their team kit and jersey number.

+AI Vision recognises athletes even where facial recognition is not possible, such as when helmets or other elements obscure a player’s face. It does this with high confidence for accuracy and the subject(s)’ prominence in the frame. Each video and photo asset is tagged automatically with descriptive keywords.

The NHL was the first Greenfly customer to use customisable scene detection to identify the context of a specific scene in a photo or video. It pinpoints and tags prominent elements such as arrivals, a save, a goal, or a game-winning celebration.

This context provided by artificial intelligence leads to incredible gallery curation. And, by processing media in seconds, it ensures immediate access to the stakeholders who need this content during games.

Greenfly’s speed and precision have transformed NHL’s LSC content workflow into a true real-time content feed. It lets the league, clubs and broadcast partners share this digital arena content with fans before the players leave the ice.

This capability extends beyond every NHL game day and night and regular season play to tentpole events LSCs also capture content for, such as the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs, NHL Draft, NHL Awards and more.

Thanks to the power of Greenfly and +AI Vision’s automated analysis and tagging, content is seamlessly organised in near-real time to specific galleries. This allows the NHL, clubs, players and broadcasters to access and share the unforgettable and exclusive moments that make NHL hockey so compelling to fans — in a matter of seconds.

Each NHL game day and night, hundreds of LSC videos and photos now make their way from the ice to fans more quickly. This rush of content enhances all stakeholders’ digital and social channels and keeps audiences glued to their favourite NHL teams and players.

According to Greenfly, as a result of +AI Vision tagging NHL players and prospects by name for LSC photo and video delivery directly to their individual galleries, the players and prospects downloaded 1605% more content from the 2022-23 NHL regular season than the 2021-22 NHL regular season.

NHL fans saw 83% more photos and videos in their feeds that were shot by the NHL’s LSCs during the 2022-23 NHL regular season than during the 2021-22 NHL regular season. A majority of this lift occurred due to a sharp increase in publishing during the NHL’s critical in-game window. Additionally, NHL fans saw 52% more photos and videos in their feeds that were shot by the NHL’s LSCs during the 2022-23 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs than during the 2021-22 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs.