In the past, merely holding rights and providing linear TV coverage of live events would be the definition of broadcasting success. That’s no longer the case.
In this digital era, today’s soccer fans have huge expectations of what coverage of their sport should be like. They want to know, and see, as soon as something happens. They want to interact with one another, and they want control over what they see. They want replays, relevant analysis, and they want to be part of an active community. Moreover, because standards of coverage are continually rising, they are disappointed when providers cannot meet their expectations.
For providers, on the other hand, worldwide tournaments represent an ad-revenue nirvana and a rare chance to win viewers and subscribers on a massive scale.
The challenge
In the run-up to the 2018 FIFA World Cup, beIN SPORTS was keen to offer its audiences in the Middle-East and North African region the kind of thrilling experience fans have come to expect by providing instant access to near-live video clips for each and every key moment in all the games.
They wanted to launch an experience with:
- Full coverage for all 64 World Cup games, taking place at any hour, in 3 different languages (Arabic, English, French).
- A new highlight created, commented and pushed automatically and instantly, as soon as a significant event - such as a goal, a shot on target or a foul - occurred, in those 3 languages.
- Full decoration and branding applied to all content posted, together with a specific Call-to-Action, inviting viewers to subscribe to beIN SPORTS’ paid digital service “beIN CONNECT”.
- Real-time distribution across multiple internal and external channels.
- At the end of each game, a fully branded summary combining important moments from the games.
With the manual workflow used by beIN SPORTS MENA, such coverage of the world’s largest sports tournament would have required far too many human resources. Moreover, the manual generation, branding and copywriting in 3 different languages, and publishing of those instant highlights, would not have been as fast as fans would like it to be.
Enter Wildmoka
A few weeks prior to the World Cup, beIN SPORTS MENA and Wildmoka partnered to deploy Wildmoka’s automated near-live highlights generation platform for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. As the platform was already deployed for their sister organization in France, we knew our core platform delivered great outcomes. But we also knew that we would have to come up with a customized workflow to overcome fully beIN SPORTS MENA’s challenge.
To make this volume of content creation manageable by just one editor, with this level of speed, in French, English, and Arabic, we needed to take as much work off their hands as possible. And this is exactly the purpose of our automated workflow.
Workflow and beIN: a partnership for football fans
We started building our automated workflow back in 2015. To make it work for soccer, we had to break down how soccer games proceeded. We came to see that even if you don’t know when something clip-worthy will happen, you do know in advance what those big moments are, and what sort of content you might want to produce out of them. To put this idea to work, we built an automated workflow that leveraged real-time content analysis together with machine learning (AI - Artificial Intelligence) to determine when a key moment occurred in a match—such as a goal—and to attach an appropriate automatically generated title and description, as well as decoration & branding to that clip, but also decide where, how and when to push that clip to audiences.
We first deployed our automated workflow for beIN SPORTS France in 2016, for the 2016 season of French soccer competition Ligue 1.
Once we demonstrated that our suite of customizable automated workflows was up to the task, beIN SPORTS MENA decided to deploy our solution throughout the entire 2018 FIFA World Cup.
The result: with just one editor, beIN MENA was able to produce more than 1000 wonderful moments from the World Cup, fully decorated, branded, commented, and distributed in seconds, covering all 64 games in the tournament in the three most widely spoken languages in the Middle East and North Africa.
“We would never have been able to produce the quantity or quality of World Cup coverage without Wildmoka,” explained Bhavesh Patel, Chief Digital Officer at beIN Media Group. “They went above and beyond, using the latest technology and deploying a customized workflow to solve our specific challenge of producing near-live highlights for millions of sports fans.”
Customer-driven roadmap
At Wildmoka, we put our know-how and creative perseverance to make our clients part of our R&D journey for a customer-driven roadmap.
If you face a unique challenge that no other live clipping tool has been able to solve, contact us today.