Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC): Process automation for live sport metadata
The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) has grown to be a highly digitalised media company over the last few years. By integrating state-of-the-art technologies and data platforms, the SBC has geared its production and broadcasting processes towards the digital age. This forward-looking approach is enabling the company to create, edit and broadcast content more efficiently.
An as yet unsolved problem is automating sports segmentation. Sports segmentation involves splitting live sport broadcasts on TV into various predefined segments – an activity that is still being performed manually at present. For example, when a football match is broadcast, it is segmented into content from the match itself (first and second halves and, where necessary, extra time and penalties) and content that is not from the match (pictures from the stadium, presentation/panel of experts in the studio). At the end, consumers of this up-to-the-second information are the media research sector and the advertising industry (for calculating the daily TV viewing figures and the minute prices for TV advertising based on this), not to mention financial controlling (for calculating the costs of content that is purchased and made in-house).
With its aim of automating this sports segmentation, Ergon has analysed the current processes related to live sports production and the systems involved. Such systems are specialised IT systems that process and provide a variety of different data in real time, including planning programs, studio automation systems, image mixers and transmission networks. By recording the system landscape and the current processes in detail, Ergon identified how and when metadata from which systems can be combined for automatic sports segmentation. In particular, Ergon has worked out where there is scope for improvement in current processes to ensure smooth sports segmentation. Another outcome is a proposal for optimising the data architecture to automatically collect and process the metadata required for sports segmentation from the various sources and to correctly provide it to the internal customers.