A journey to building a Dalet sports stadium
As a Canadian, I was brought up to love hockey, but as a technologist and trainer, there’s nothing better than walking around a stadium, meeting and interacting with all of the different characters involved in a sporting event and witnessing first hand how coaches, players, fans, directors and video editors, to name a few, can benefit from a good MAM system (Media Asset Management).
Gone are the days of coaches rummaging through disorganized closets to find tapes of old game footage; in a Dalet Sports Factory stadium, all twenty or more camera feeds are directly ingested into the Dalet Galaxy MAM platform, stamped and synchronized by timecode. Associating multiple video streams from different camera angles, the play-by-play action is logged by professional sports loggers while generating official statistics for the national league. Using Dalet Sports Logger with customizable sports-specific action buttons, a facility can generate metadata-rich content for every sporting event., allowing coaches or players the ability to easily search and preview any play from any camera angle that has been recorded, or is currently recording, into the system.
Fans in the stadium can’t help but notice the enormous screens, high above the action, broadcasting instant replays of the game just seconds after they see it happen in real-time. Managed by in-house studio directors using Dalet On-Air Playout tools, highlights of the game are automatically created using the key information entered by the sports loggers, which enables the directors to easily select the clips they wish to display on those big screens to excite fans.
Fast search and browse tools give video editors the ability to find key plays based on teams, players, games or any other relevant information. They then quickly create highlight reels of all the amazing moments of the season using the Dalet OneCut video editor or other well-known non-linear editing systems, such as Adobe Premiere®, Avid® or Final Cut Pro®. All the key plays logged by sports loggers appear on the video editing timeline as markers for any video recorded of the event, making a video editor’s job simple and efficient while editing multiple camera angles.
In any case where the stadium or team has rights to the game footage, Dalet’s integration with YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms means all highlights, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage will automatically be saved and displayed in the highest quality and correct format, along with all of the descriptive metadata entered by the sports loggers, using the Dalet AmberFin transcode platform. Whenever someone watches a highlight on the web or adds a comment, this data is fed back to the Dalet system, allowing players to have a closer interaction with their fans.
With all these benefits gained from a well crafted MAM solution, one might suggest that sports bodies need to redefine the rules regarding the use of technology, as a good MAM gives an unfair advantage to the teams that have one over those that don’t.