Posted: 16/03/2015
Forscene was launched over ten years ago, at IBC 2004, and successfully completed its first major sporting contract back in 2012 with the Summer Olympics. But Forscene is only now becoming an accepted part of sports post-production workflows. In the first quarter of this year we have already signed a significant new contract with IMG, expanded our deltatre portfolio and fielded numerous sport workflow enquiries…so why is Forscene becoming more appealing and relevant in sports workflows in 2015?
Most importantly, digital content distribution is no longer an afterthought. Realising the potential income from digital content distribution, many sports rights holders now split the licencing for broadcast and digital rights content. This has created space for digitally focused companies to own the post-production and distribution of web and mobile content with a different mind-set, ensuring digital is no longer an afterthought – and to choose products that serve this content best.
Digital content delivery is all about speed, efficiency and price point – which play directly to Forscene’s strengths.
Whether it’s getting to the finish line or getting content onto your website – every-one involved in sports wants to be first. And that means being efficient. Forscene ingests and transcodes growing files a few seconds behind the live sports event from traditional SDI, IP or cloud streams, allowing you to work in a single post-production platform for logging, search, editing, conform (often faster than real-time) and distribution. Forscene also integrates with market leading brands like EVS, enabling best practice workflows with pre-existing infrastructure.
Unfortunately, budgets in digital content remain a fraction of those in broadcast, so traditional broadcast post workflows using traditional broadcast equipment are not a viable solution for this growing market. As a cloud service, Forscene has a low cost of entry for ingest hardware on premise, or a zero cost of entry for virtualised services. For seasonal rights Forscene is offered as a package licensing model, and for one-off events on a per-user basis as a SaaS model. Our clients plug our service into their proposals without the need for our input, as costing is as simple as counting ingest feeds and number of users and deciding where the conform is going.
ESPN commented at a recent Sports Video Group event, that more than a third of their live event budgets are spent on human resource. Forscene clients make substantial savings by not having to send post-production staff to sporting events. As a cloud-based platform, Forscene transcodes the original high-res source into our own proprietary proxy and makes it available anywhere in the world over a modest Internet connection of around 1.2Mbps. Teams then work in a collaborative environment off one set of shared content, from various locations.
After a strong start to the year we have recently signed on as sponsors of SVG events throughout 2015 in both Europe and the US. I am attending the SVG Europe Football Production Summit this week in Barcelona and look forward to catching up with existing clients and making some new connections at the event.
Drop me an email or LinkedIn message should you want to meet.
Jason
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Jon Hanford - Group CTO, Deltatre