Scaling Video Production: SoccerWatch Success Story
Marvin Baudewig, CTO of SoccerWatch, telling how the company is now able to scale up video production capabilities using existing resources
AISpotter had the pleasure of speaking with Marvin Baudewig, who is the CTO of SoccerWatch and is responsible for sales and the technical side of the SoccerWatch products.
Marvin, could you please say a few words about SoccerWatch?
Soccerwatch.tv is a rising German start-up company founded 4 years ago. It developed an automatic camera system for amateur clubs and a platform to broadcast their games on the internet either live or by demand.
‘Digitize Amateur Football’ is the company’s goal. SoccerWatch has secured the German Football Association (DFB) for a five-year cooperation and is now offering the second generation fully automatic camera-K2 for all clubs.
What kind of challenges with regards to video analysis and streaming have you faced?
Video analysis of football games is indeed quite time-consuming and labour-intensive.
Let me give you an example. If around 100 matches are streamed over the weekend, then 10-15 employees would need to watch the video streams and manually mark every single key event of each game (e.g. goal, corner kick).
How did you address these challenges?
At SoccerWatch we were broadcasting hundreds of sports videos, most of which were running at the same time. So, we realized that making processes automated was the only way forward.
While working and developing our own in-house solution, we got in touch with AISpotter and found that they had already created the technology we needed. At SoccerWatch we analysed the market and concluded that AISpotter had the best service package and the most competitive offer. Nowadays automated sports analytics is an important aspect of our business model.
I believe that automation will be the cornerstone in the future. At SoccerWatch we want to ensure that every athlete has access to the relevant data to improve performance. To make this possible for both professional and amateur sports, automation is the key.
What’s so good about AISpotter?
The service is easy to set up and the process runs flawlessly. AISpotter has easily integrated everything into the system of SoccerWatch, it automatically analyses video recordings of the matches that we provide and delivers the desired data.
Together with AISpotter, the company is able to provide video highlights to the games played by lower football leagues. Moreover, AISpotter solves the problem of scalability, which is almost impossible to achieve by doing manual work.
By using the services of AISpotter, the work is getting a lot easier as we can put a heavy load on AI (artificial intelligence) to detect key game events. Employees can focus on quality verification. That way we can continuously increase our video streaming production and offer high-quality content to our customers.
What are the company’s plans for the future?
We’ve been using the services of AISpotter since March 2020, and the experience has been excellent so far! I’m confident that SoccerWatch and AISpotter will continue their close collaboration in the future.
About AISpotter
AISpotter is a cloud-based video analysis and intelligent highlight production service. It uses its own AI models to analyse video content from any camera, locate desired events, generate intelligent highlights, and combine them with data streams, statistics, and sensor data.
The technology enables streaming companies and sports clubs to scale up their video production capabilities using the existing resources. AISpotter can analyse large numbers of simultaneous matches saving hours of production time. It automatically generates highlights for corner kicks, goals, and other game events.
Contact me for further information: Anri Kivimäki