SPORTS TECHNOLOGY OF THE YEAR
GroundWOW®
GroundWOW® is the world’s first autonomous full colour stadium ground printer. The central premise of GroundWOW® is to turn under-utilised ground real estate into advertising revenue.
Deployable in under 10 minutes, autonomous technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning and an end-to-end cloud platform combine to create images as accurate to a blade of grass. With a primary focus in sport, GroundWOW® provides a globally distributed network of interconnected robots with potential applications across different industries. From sports sponsorships and advertising applications, corporate hospitality, and events, to conferences and exhibitions, GroundWOW® activates dormant ground real estate and unlocks new revenue streams. There’s a GroundWOW® for every purpose, with a robot to suit every budget and individual requirement. We make printing on ground as easy as printing on paper™.
Hawk-Eye Innovations / Serie A – Hawk-Eye Innovations
Hawk-Eye Innovations in partnership with Lega Serie A, successfully trialled virtual replay technology, HawkVISION, on a live broadcast for the first time during the Coppa Italia Final on the 11th of May 2022.
The Coppa Italia final between Juventus Football Club and Inter Milan FC was the first game for a virtual replay to be produced and played into a live broadcast with data-driven metrics overlayed on top of the replay.
HawkVISION is Hawk-Eye’s latest ‘Insight’ product that uses the high-fidelity and low latency skeletal player and ball tracking data from Hawk-Eye’s SkeleTRACK system to produce next-generation graphical visualisations outputs.
HawkVISION combines both virtual recreation and augmented graphics creation over both live and replayed video, facilitating the generation of high-impact content at minimal latency to drive engagement across broadcast, digital and social platforms.
This system processes SkeleTRACK data in real-time and transforms it into a “virtually recreated” reflection of the live-action. This offers unlimited possibilities for experiences that address rightsholders, partners and fan needs alike.
LiveScore – LiveScore
The ‘LiveScore OTT Automation Engine’ revolutionised the way LiveScore approaches free-to-air live streaming, driving huge value for the brand, football fans, rightsholders and commercial partners alike.
As disruptors within the OTT live-streaming space, and unbiased by existing solutions or investments, LiveScore employed a creative and digital-first mindset that empowered the business to invest in premium rights and deliver them at scale. Leveraging the power of the cloud ecosystem, automated technology ensured LiveScore was able to deliver elite production and live-streaming at a fraction of the manpower and expense of traditional broadcast methods.
At its essence, the ‘LiveScore OTT Automation Engine’ eliminated almost all manual elements of match production, with the world feed, sponsorship content, in-house preview shows and advertising seamlessly integrated with minimal operational heavy lifting.
The exceptional efficiencies of the technology empowered LiveScore to secure a world-class rights deal with UEFA, securing a three-year deal to broadcast ALL 137 UEFA Champions League matches fully free-to-air to football fans in Ireland.
The outcome represented an outstanding benefit to Irish consumers, who previously only had access to 14 free-to-air matches per season via traditional broadcast channels, whilst introducing thousands of fans into the LiveScore product ecosystem.
Singular.live
Singular.live is an enabling technology that helps everyone involved in live sport production reduce the environmental impact of their production whilst maintaining the highest production quality.
It removes barriers to entry enabling anyone from any background to learn a new skill and create a new career in live production which in turn helps our industry get a more vibrant and diverse workforce.
Singular offers the ability for content creators to better engage with their audiences with next-gen personalized and interactive viewing experiences. Best of all it does all of this whilst massively reducing the operational and environmental costs.
Supponor AIR – Supponor
Supponor AIR is arguably the most disruptive technology innovation to hit the evolving live broadcast sports industry due to its two-fold proposition which uses next-generation AI and ML technquies as a differentiator that on one hand drives increasingly scalable commercial opportunity for rights owners and agencies whilst simultaneoulsy improving accessibility to these technologies by reducing the cost of operations in terms of production efficiency and their toll on the environment. In contrast with many highly innovative technology solutions in the broadcast and media industry, Supponor AIR is a direct enabler of increased commercial revenues to the market through tartgeted audience and brand experiences in an ever more globalised industry. Supponor AIR is more than innovative technolgy, it forms part of a proven technology platform, enabling rights owners to drive increased revenue, week in week out and at scale across top-tier football leagues and properties, such as UEFA, Lega Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga, the LFP and A-Leagues, and across a quicky expanding range of other tier 1 sports around the globe.
Warner Bros. Discovery – The Cube
The Cube is Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) state-of-the-art mixed-reality studio that was rebuilt, redesigned and revolutionised for Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, the tennis Grand Slams and for the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes – a new opportunity taken given it was the first time such a studio has been used for cycling.
Challenged with differentiating its Olympics coverage from 40 national broadcast partners, and to tell the stories from Beijing 2022 while operating under strict Covid-19 restrictions, WBD required a technical solution that maximised fan engagement and transported viewers to the event destinations.
To address this, the Cube was built from scratch with even greater ambition, integrating new software and motion graphics to push its technical, visual and analytical capacities – including the integration of Hawkeye data for tennis coverage – far beyond any traditional virtual set.
It engaged a record number of viewers for an Olympics 50+ markets in Europe as well as helped drive record streaming audiences for its coverage of the Australian Open, Roland-Garros, the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes across discovery+ Eurosport and GCN+.
