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Icelandic Football choose Newsbridge
- 21 July, 2022
FRA: Founded in 1947, The Football Association of Iceland (KSÍ) is the governing body of football within the country, with its headquarters based at the national stadium Laugardalsvöllur, in the capital, Reykjavík. KSÍ oversees all football competitions in Iceland, men’s and women’s, from Icelandic Top Football (ÍTF) - a union of all clubs in the top two divisions - to youth competitions. KSÍ has been affiliated with FIFA since 1947, and with UEFA since 1953. Iceland became the smallest nation by population to ever clinch a FIFA World Cup berth when they qualified for the 2018 tournament.
OZ Sports is at the intersection of live sports and gaming technologies. Its mission is to create spectacular video experiences for every sports league with no sacrifice in quality. Centered around its global roll-out of the OZ Smart Stadium for any sport, at any location.
Challenge & Context
Football is ingrained in Iceland’s sporting culture - registered players account for approximately 7.3% of the country’s 376,000-strong population. With media rights ownership in hand for the very first time, KSÍ and ÍTF wanted to be able to record all League matches - up to eight at once - and store them in a central, easily accessible location.
ÍTF was also looking for a way to clip and make game highlights available to its 18 teams. The ideal platform would let ÍTF both distribute and potentially monetize content assets to help achieve global growth of Icelandic football, and unlock new revenue streams.
The Newsbridge Solution
For KSÍ and ÍTF, Newsbridge’s Cloud Media Hub was the perfect platform to ingest multiple match live streams, which are recorded by Icelandic sports technology firm OZ Sports.
Multimodal AI Indexing technology which automatically detects people, objects, logos, context and speech, is applied for transcription and Icelandic-to-English translation. Player information and game stats from Genius Sports are automatically synced with the media files thanks to a customized integration. Facial recognition and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) can be used in the Media Hub to automatically cut match and sponsor highlights. The Newsbridge mobile app allows users to quickly access and post key game moments on the go to share with team supporters.
Newsbridge’s Media Marketplace gives ÍTF the option to turn football match minutes into revenue. Content buyers, sponsors and partners can be invited to the platform to browse, clip & collect and arrange payment for the match video highlights they need.
Media assets are available in hot storage for one month before moving to cold storage for cost optimization, preserving Iceland’s games in a secure cloud archive.
Collections folders within ÍTF’s Newsbridge Media Hub.
Birgir Jóhannsson, CEO of Icelandic Toppfootball commented: “Newsbridge is the versatile cloud media hub solution that we were looking for. Its live ingest capabilities and automatic indexing opens enormous opportunities for us to supercharge our workflows and shine a spotlight on our fantastic national competition. We’re also excited by the ways in which we can use Newsbridge’s Media Marketplace to potentially drive commercial revenue to benefit the entire Icelandic football ecosystem.”
Gudjon Gudjonsson, CEO of OZ Sports said: “Adding Newsbrige to our group of strong technology partners has helped OZ service sports federations and clubs around the world. With both production and now a powerful media management platform, from cataloging full matches, highlights, to even VAR training clips. We look forward to building our future in media management with Newsbrige."
KSÍ’s Newsbridge Media Hub - How It Works
ÍTF’s workflow with Newsbridge.
OZ Sports can directly ingest up to 10 simultaneous SRT streams to the Newsbridge Media Hub. Genius Sports data is synched with the media files which are also enriched with metadata through Multimodal AI Indexing. 50 ÍTF users from departments including marketing and digital can search, clip and collect the video assets they need.
Frederic Petitpont, Newsbridge Co-Founder & CTO said: “KSÍ and ÍTF were just 10 days from the start of the season when they set us the challenge of establishing their AI-powered Media Hub with up to 10 live feeds and archive capabilities. I’m pleased to say the Newsbridge team delivered! We’re proud to be empowering Icelandic football to centralize, auto-index and capitalize on their media assets with our market-leading Cloud Media Hub with AI technology, and our Media Marketplace.”
KSÍ x Newsbridge by the numbers
- 1,800 hours of video per year - or 600 games.
- Up to 8 simultaneous SRT streams.
- 50 hours per month of transcription & translation powered by Newsbridge Multimodal AI Indexing.
Visit Newsbridge at IBC2022, Hall 7, Stand #B09, 9 - 12 September, at the RAI Amsterdam.
