The team is ramping up to 150 hours a day through the FPD Samma alone
(plus the playing partners). The video quality is rated, so a researcher can quickly discount those that do not track the flight of the ball perfectly, for example. Then the content of the clip has to be added. Is the putt made? What is the reaction of the player and the crowd? Is there a close-up of the player? Is there any signage visible? You might need to research a shot later that is clean of sponsors’ branding, or possibly a sponsor might want to buy a shot of a particular player in front of its logo. “The future is the logger,”
according to Browning. IPV built a logger on a web services interface. It uses on-screen buttons to ensure that all the right information is added, using a standardised lexicon so that later researchers will find all the relevant material. A tool is included to estimate the distance to the pin from the video. The logger is designed to be fast and easy for operators, so the same tool is used for logging live play as is used for ingested content. Logging play information
for sport using a button- based interface is not new. The challenge in this implementation is setting up the buttons in the first place, because of the huge number of variables in golf. Again, IPV offered a smart solution, using a tool called Metadata Central, part of its Teragator semantic data processor. The essence of Metadata
Central is that it harvests information from external sources. Applications have included trawling through social media to build up a realtime picture of audience reaction to a programme and the segments and personalities within it. At Golf Channel, Metadata
Central automatically researches the data needed for a tournament, looking at websites for the course, the tournament, the player rankings and money list, the weather and other sources. The buttons on the logger have to be defined anew for each day of each tournament: this automates it. “IPV developed for us a really cool tool which collects just the information we need,” said Browning. “It populates the logger automatically. We just check it before it goes live.”
Rich metadata The roadmap for Golf Channel includes extending the IPV Teragator capabilities to collate further information.
It will connect not just to the broadcaster’s own iNews system but to other web news services to build up a picture of the players and the play. This data can support the live commentators as
well as add to the rich metadata attached to the archive content. “Teragator knows what the important parts of the information are,” according to Browning. “Anyone will be
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able to use it as a powerful research tool.” The relationship between Golf Channel and IPV has clearly moved on from a browse vendor rescuing an asset management project. “IPV are not tied to
any other manufacturer and work with everyone, which is nice. More important, they are all very clever people who seem to delight in coming up with responses to difficult challenges.”