The present and future of automated production for football, with Football Club

The team of Football Club, a service that allows football clubs to broadcast their own matches automatically thanks to artificial intelligence and a video-on-demand platform, shows the current state of automated production and how it is helping to return the most authentic football to fans.

Football Club, an initiative born from former Footters employees, was born just a year ago with the aim of revitalize grassroots football offering hundreds of clubs throughout Spain an alternative to find new income streams through audiovisual content.

Its proposal is based on offering a platform streaming to which fans can subscribe to watch live or delayed matches of their local teams, regardless of their category. In this way, they have the opportunity to both enjoy a 2nd RFEF match, but also to get together to watch a quarry meeting in which a son, granddaughter or nephew can participate.

Los traditional means of production would make it impossible this proposal. The costs of traditional connections, the living wage for a camera operator and director, or the rental of equipment, would involve expenses that are not included. would be compensated in lower categories or minority leagues in Spain.

Faced with this reality, the Football Club team decided to rely on automated production so that, through a single device, a connection to the public internet and one CDN, the broadcast of a confrontation dramatically reduces its costs while boosting the clubs' income from visibility e direct income via subscription.

Manuel Sanchez, operations coordinator; Alfonso Ramos, content director, and Miguel Trujilo, technical chief, allow us to know the keys that identify Football Club as a unique model in Spain, they show how the evolution of automated production technology has been and anticipate its future technological and conceptual.

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“Real” football

“Queremos que los aficionados entiendan que sus clubes no tienen por qué ser el Real Madrid o el Barcelona, sino todos esos clubes modestos en los que la mayoría de participantes son voluntarios y los tienen cerca de sus casas”, explica Manuel Sanchez a la hora de definir la misión de Football Club. Alejados de eterno crecimiento hacia categorías superiores, la propuesta de esta empresa recoge una de las metas primigenias de Footters: la de acercar al aficionado al fútbol amateur y semiprofesional.

“Queremos que los aficionados entiendan que sus equipos no tienen por qué ser el Real Madrid o el Barcelona, sino todos esos clubes modestos en los que la mayoría de participantes son voluntarios y los tienen cerca de sus casas”.

Inevitably, this world will be conditioned by some economic limitations that will restrict its reach and projection, even in a world marked by the democratization of audiovisual access and social networks. To this day, it remains unimaginable that a mobile phone camera could cause a production that covers the 100 meters of the football field, offering details of the plays through the usual video-on-demand consumption channels.

There is a midpoint between the amateurismo previously described and the large displays of sports production reserved for the major soccer divisions in our country: the automated production. Betting on advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, processing cloud y machine learning, it is now possible to offer clubs a solid, profitable and resilient technological solution with increasingly natural results. But how is this technology combined with a profitability and income model?

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Football Club's business model

Football Club has managed to design a proposal that makes it possible for clubs, whatever their size, to be able to count on the necessary technological resources to produce your meetings without the need for initial investment and without maintenance, management or repair costs of any kind.

Those teams interested in entering the Football Club model will be assisted with the installation of a system of automated production, composed of a capture and production team with four aligned 4K resolution optics that only requires a network connection and electricity. The content generated by these cameras, which can also be used in training for issues formative or strategic, comes directly to the Football Club platform, built on Mediastream.

This streaming platform is made profitable through the subscriptions of fans who want to watch their teams' matches. By way of royalties, a percentage is calculated on the content that serves as a return for the clubs.

The monetization is complemented by the possibility of including advertisements in the broadcasts through a adserver that Football Club serves the clubs free of charge, and with the visibility which offers to have a platform where participants can watch their meetings live; a particular photo album, as detailed Alfonso Ramos, which is also promoting the multiplication of registrations in the different categories.

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The evolution of automated production

Manuel Sanchez considers that the artificial intelligence dedicated to automated production has taken “a spectacular leap” in the last five years, which translates into improvements that elevate the viewing experience for viewers.

Initially, these production systems simply identified a white dot (the ball) and followed it on a playing field with a mask. corner a corner previously defined. Now, as Miguel Trujillo details, his capabilities go much further: “He no longer only follows the soccer ball, but he is capable of trachea each of the people that they concentrate on the field and apply the right zoom to transfer the action to that terrain." Likewise, the system is capable of extracting in real time statistics of each of the players, which in the future could be used to extract pieces with highlights or to serve as information in the postpartido for the coaches.

“my fight is that the fans understand that on this type of playing field there are no sites enabled for recordings. (…) It should not be seen as something bad, but rather something especial. Deep down, we are sneaking into a different football, closer to the reality of sport.”

The solutions used by Football Club are made up of four 4K cameras that make up a 8K panoramic resolution. That image is uploaded in real time to sistema cloud from the provider of the automated production system, which processes the image to generate a crop in 1080p with the signal made centralizing the action at the point of interest of the action. The system, once processed, reaches the Football Club platform with a latency of between 15 and 20 seconds. The audio, also essential for the meeting, is collected directly by the integrated microphone in the automated production solution.

The result, of notable quality and solvency, has a different finish than the major television productions of the main Spanish leagues. For Alfonso Ramos, this is not an inconvenience, but the reality of football with self-identity: "My struggle is for fans to understand that on this type of playing field there are no places enabled for recording. Sometimes, we have to place the automated cameras above a locker room or on some plates; wherever possible. We should not see it as something bad, but rather something special. Deep down, we are sneaking into a different football, closer to the reality of the sport."

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Limitations, errors and machine learning

The most common errors of this type of system (such as the confusion of the ball by a bald coach or the interference of elements such as birds crossing the image) have already been solved, although there are other challenges that could help naturalize broadcasts and make it closer to the traditional broadcast experience, the one that for now only the experienced filmmaker and human cameramen can assure.

“We can now click on points of interest to educate the system so that it can automatically identify in future meetings.”

For example, there are sets in the match that do not depend on tracking the ball, such as the goal celebration or the commotion caused around a arbitration decision, which can be fundamental parts of the broadcast of a football match. For these cases, automated production systems already offer tools to improve the system y correct errors (or refocus attention): "We can click on points of interest to educate the system so that it can automatically identify them in future matches. Previously, when a goalkeeper stepped forward on the field of play in a corner kick, the camera detected him as a player and the frame was further away. Now, the system already knows that it is a regular shot and is not decisive, so the focus is on the shot and the area," he explains. Trujillo.

In addition to these human-assisted processes, the machine learning is capable of processing the loss of tracking of a ball. The system, of motu proprio, will be able to analyze all the recording in its processing phase for VOD, detect the moment of loss of the ball, and redo the broadcast so that the resulting video is uploaded with this problem fixed.

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The streaming platform

All content created by automated production solutions arrives directly for viewing via streaming or VOD on the platform Football Club, which brings together matches, original content driven by creators passionate about grassroots football and compilations of goals or plays of interest. The system offers an intuitive visual experience through a web portal, although the Football Club team has prepared apps for iOS and Android that will see the light imminently.

The platform, built on the basis of MediaStream, has been designed to offer the simplest possible experience for the user. As Trujillo explains: “For a grandfather to come in, see the club where his grandson plays and be able to replay the game, for me it is a great technical achievement.” The rest of the most common technological components of this type of platforms, such as recommendations, chatbox, donations or choosing favorites They are already prepared for implementation. They will arrive, yes, in the right time. This is how Sánchez tells it: "We have it all, but hidden. The first impression we want to give is simplicity so that the user doesn't go crazy."

In this line of accessibility, the content is grouped in a section for the platforms of Second RFEF, with the aim of serving as a hub so that the followers of this league can follow it easily; Channel Club, that allows access to all the matches of a specific club that is associated with the Club; Crazy about football, which brings together different streamers following a league or club to generate community, and the compilations of best goals or promising youth stars.

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Technological improvements and loyalty to grassroots football

Football Club's technological tomorrow is closely linked to improvements in automated production solutions. Among them are two critical elements that could mark the evolution of your visual proposal.

On the one hand, the automated multi-camera productions They are already a reality proven by providers of automated production solutions and by Football Club itself, which has carried out several tests and can determine their correct functioning. The main drawback remains the cost which implies having several cameras instead of a single unit in the field of modest clubs that Football Club addresses. It will be the demand of the users themselves, or the cheaper devices, which will end up defining the suitability of these promising systems in your business model.

The second improvement involves what Trujillo defines as the “dehumanization of the narrative.” As the technical manager verbalizes, it is very difficult to get narrators for all the categories of all the matches broadcast by each club. For this reason, automated production tools already prepare production systems. visual identification and text-to-speech which, in a similar way to a sports video game, are capable of identifying the game's moves and narrate the meeting mentando a los jugadores, celebrando goles o reaccionando faltas. Esta mejora no busca sustituir a profesionales, sino permitir la narración en aquellos ámbitos en los que no se encuentran actualmente, mejorando la experiencia de visualización de los aficionados.

The updates proposed by the automated production industry will allow Football Club to continue growing. Of course, its growth will not be vertical, increasingly targeting clubs with greater resources, but horizontal and even inferior, encompassing more and more local and regional teams that want to project their message, create fans and find new business avenues. Technology will be your companion in achieving your objectives. In the words of Trujillo: "Our objective is not to climb upwards, but downwards and continue helping all those lower categories. We do not want to think about superior teams, but rather the Alevín from a neighborhood club has the best possible production”.

A report by Sergio Julián Gómez