RIO DE JANEIRO—Launched in 2012, Fox Sports Brasil has taken the lead in bringing world-class sports to as many viewers as possible, and has quickly become a top sports broadcaster in Brazil. We own rights to several exclusive sporting events, including the 2018 FIFA World Cup—which set new viewership records for the channel.
With such a massive amount of content to broadcast, and viewers wanting to access this content across a variety of platforms, we needed a sophisticated archiving technology solution that could help meet this demand—one that would be easy to manage and have enough capacity to hold our increasing collection of sports footage. Beyond that, we also needed to improve our ability to find content in our archives. Given the growing demand, generating new content through archive footage had become just as important as delivering live sports.
However, in looking to deliver this footage, finding the right content proved to be nearly impossible. Luckily, a good portion of our archive content was on YouTube, and we found that the ability to search historical video footage on YouTube was good enough to yield adequate results. Unfortunately, the quality of this footage was rather poor since it had been formatted multiple times for different platforms. It didn’t take long to realize we needed to find a better way.
THREE CRITERIA
We determined three criteria our ideal solution would meet. First, it had to be able to not only enrich the metadata of our numerous ingest streams, but also scan and enrich the archives. Next, it needed to be appropriately automated and simple to manage. Finally, the entire workflow had to remain on-premise, due to security concerns about moving our archive into the cloud, and cost considerations of frequently retrieving data. We settled on an artificial intelligence (AI) solution, since AI can be used to enrich volumes of metadata through cognitive engine processing.
After an extensive review, it became clear that Quantum provided the only option that met all of our criteria, including leveraging AI. The Quantum team—working with Seal Broadcast & Content—built a hybrid-cloud AI platform based on Quantum’s Xcellis storage appliance. This AI solution connects transparently to StorNext, Quantum’s file system for protecting, preserving and accessing rich media content.
We can now easily index and access 60,000 hours of archived content and live programming, and the AI-enabled workflow allows us to search content more rapidly to meet aggressive production deadlines.
A BETTER BROADCAST BUSINESS
The business impacts of the new solution have been immense. We can more quickly find the archived footage we need. And now that the entire archive is searchable, we’re constantly finding more relevant and compelling footage. And last but not least, the end product is of much higher quality. Ultimately, Quantum’s StorNext-based Xcellis on-premise solution has enabled us to be more agile, cost-effective and productive, and has gotten viewers across Brasil even more engaged with their sports content.
Luis Santos, vice president of Engineering & Operations for Fox Sports Brasil has worked in the sports and entertainment industry since 1995. He moved to the Fox Network Group in 2011 to launch Fox Sports Brazil Channels. He can be reached atLuis.Santos@Fox.com.
For more information, please visitwww.quantum.comor call 800-667-6268.
