Project description
Cost-efficient, quality sports production and broadcast
With sports having enormous appeal worldwide and representing 2 % of Europe’s GDP, innovative solutions and ideas are in high demand. Currently, more than 10 million fans in Europe watch sports online. Despite this interest, only around 10 % of sports are transmitted due to the costs of the event production, which make it unviable to produce non-premium sports and leagues. The EU funded OZeye project by OZ Sports aims to change this by introducing the OZeye software system. It is based on AI, as well as robotic and computer vision technologies. This system will allow for cost efficient, high-quality production and broadcasting of sports, expanding the amount of the available content.
Objective
Sports play a key economic role in Europe, representing 2% of European GDP. European sports audiovisual content has significant global appeal, similar to the role that Hollywood or TV play in the USA. Only in Europe there are 50,000 leagues played in 240,000 venues, and more than 10 million fans consume sports online. Despite these numbers, fans do not actually have access to all the sports they demand: current broadcasting offering is focused on top-tier competitions (just representing 10% of total competitions) but non-premium leagues and secondary sports (e.g. female competitions), i.e. 90%, remain almost totally uncovered. This is because sports events are very expensive to produce (up to €60,000 per match, due to manpower involved in logistics, recording, editing and other time-consuming tasks). This coverage gap impacts on the complete sport ecosystem, unable to 100% exploit of their capabilities and on the low visibility of female and secondary sports.
OZeye will overcome these problems. It is a software system that, by smartly exploiting latest Computer Vision, AI and robotic technologies, automatizes the production and broadcasting of sports games at the best quality, reducing production costs by 95%, enabling broadcasting of currently under-covered competitions and sports. OZeye also enhances fan-experience and expand commercial content exploitation such as stadium augmentation or integrated advertisement. OZeye is developed by OZ Sports, an Icelandic company offering general-purpose online video since 2009. We have been selected from over 600 companies for the prestigious scaling program Nordic Scalers, to help us scale up in the USA. In addition, we have been selected as one of the top 50 most innovative companies in sports for 2018 by Hype Sports Innovation, the largest global eco-system for sports innovation. We forecast accumulated profits of €28.1 million for our company in 2024 and our team to grow +120 people.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorsoptical sensors
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationssystem software
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputer vision
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
101 REYKJAVIK
Iceland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.