Posted: 05/05/2015
Launched at IBC 2004, Forscene has an amazing 10 year track record in cloud post-production, but only three short years in live sports. Our entry into sports post-production was the ultimate baptism of fire – working on the biggest event in the sports calendar with one of the biggest broadcasters in the world, NBC. In 2012 we were contracted by YouTube to provide the Highlights Factory editing platform for 50 editors based in New York during the London Olympics. The project was a major success and earned Forscene great praise – but arguably the biggest benefit of this project was the experience and industry insight we gained. The eight month development cycle provided the building blocks of Forscene’s integration with leading sports technologies and the fundamental basis of our platform’s sport solution – and gave us the opportunity to work closely and build relationships with some of the biggest players in sports production. But one successful project – even if it’s the Olympics – doesn’t guarantee your place in sports post-production.
Over the next two years we worked with our new sports partners to refine our offering, rework our business model and redesign our user interface. We worked on many successful sports projects over this time, but for me NAB 2015 was the watershed moment for Forscene in sports – when we moved from promising a revolutionary workflow to being able to demonstrate a proven solution. At NAB 2015 we presented both our Forscene / Microsoft Azure / deltatre and EVS / Forscene / T3Media workflows and how these solutions have been used by industry leaders on a variety of international sporting events since 2012. And the industry’s reaction was overwhelming.
So what is our sports virtualised post-production workflow and what makes it so great?
Our integration with Microsoft Azure enables live streams from Azure Media Services to be ingested into Forscene with a transcode latency of around 20 seconds – from ingest to an editor working with the content anywhere in the world. Along with the live streams any associated metadata also becomes available to the editor. Forscene’s integration with deltatre’s Magma graphics system means that a full highlights package can then be created using Forscene’s feature-rich NLE. Once the highlights package is complete and the metadata has been edited or added, the sequence is dropped back onto Azure (or directly to YouTube) for faster-than-real-time conform and distribution. So the entire process is virtualised – no Forscene ingest or transcode hardware is required onsite – which saves time and money and provides our clients with real scalability.
We certainly seem to have captured the industry’s interest and we’re looking forward to demonstrating Forscene at a range of events over the next couple of weeks.
At SVG Sport Tech in Manchester on the 6th & 7th of May I shared our experience of working with a key client and talked about how we’ve integrated Forscene into their suite of services to enable a complete end-to-end virtualised sports workflow.
My colleagues Jeff Krebs from our North American office & our Director of Marketing Aziz Musa, attended the SVG College Sports Summit in Atlanta last month. Read the blog post on how Forscene is the perfect partner for college sports challenges.
With an acceleration in one-off sports events and long term seasonal contracts, Forscene is now a serious player in sports post-production in 2015. I am thrilled to be a part of this amazing Forscene journey and look forward to engaging with clients, potential clients and partners in the coming months.
Jason
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