Changing the way we view live events
About 95 % of sporting and cultural events never make it to our screens. This primarily boils down to high production costs. “In the world of sports, whether a league is broadcasted or not makes all the difference. If it is, sponsors and advertisers can bring revenue to the sport. If it is not, there is no opportunity for this. So there is a circular catch: you are forecasted to have a low audience, and hence you are not produced, so you are out of the business,” notes Antonio Rodriguez Del Corral, project coordinator and CEO at cinfo, a Spanish company leader in automatic production technologies. This is where the EU-funded TiiVii project stepped in. “Our main objective was to provide a new business model to nonprofessional sports,” confirms Rodriguez Del Corral. The project proposed ‘tiivii’, an accessible and affordable, fully automated professional TV platform that allows any sports club, league or federation to create its scalable TV channels with live, on-demand content. What’s great about the solution is that it can also be used for the automatic and remote production of educational and cultural events. “It can also reduce, by 90 %, the cost of producing events,” adds Rodriguez Del Corral.
Realising the vision of automating professional TV production
“To fulfil our overall vision, it is not enough to just record an event. A basic production that boringly moves a single camera side to side will be cheap but will fail to engage viewers and attract sponsorships,” explains Rodriguez Del Corral. As a result, the project worked towards creating professional-looking productions, with optical zoom in and out, change of camera, interviews, and advanced graphics. Specifically, the solution uses HD, 4K and 8K cameras and can incorporate robotic cameras, mobile phones or 5G backpacked cameras into its productions. Regarding 5G integration, the tiivii system has been successfully deployed in the edge computing side of 2 major European telco’s 5G networks. “We also aimed to execute all of that automatically by AI. This is our key result, an AI engine able to perform many tasks simultaneously,” highlights Rodriguez Del Corral. In today’s productions, there are human camera operators coordinated by a human producer. “We have thus created an AI camera operator and an AI producer that collaborate to do the job. Also, we allow humans to collaborate with those AI agents to create high-level audio-visual productions,” confirms Rodriguez Del Corral.
Paving the way for master producers
The project expects that young people will learn to use their system and, together with AI, become master producers. “We have customers that have gone from zero to thousands in audience numbers, and we expect that in a few years, thousands of sports leagues will go audio-visual and also help local businesses to get exposure,” reports Rodriguez Del Corral. This aligns with the EU’s goals of increasing innovation in SMEs. Within the year, 1 000 events have been produced using the tiivii solution. “In fact, as of October 2022, the solution is producing at a rate of 250 events per month, and with the growth in sales, it is expected to reach 5 000 events per year in 2023, spanning a wide range of customers, from third division Austrian handball clubs to LALIGA Spanish first division top representatives” concludes Rodriguez Del Corral.
Keywords
TiiVii, sports, AI, educational and cultural events , 5G, automated professional TV platform, TV production
