Posted: 11/12/2015
2015 has been Forscene’s most successful year in sport. We’ve grown our client-base enabling Forscene use on 15 brands and now work with digital content creators for a range of disciplines including golf, cycling, volleyball, athletics, football (soccer for our US friends), rugby union and league.
We got off to a great start in February when IMG licensed Forscene to create content for all the distributor’s digital rights channels. As an organisation we were thrilled that the world’s largest independent distributor of sports programming recognised Forscene as the leading cloud post-production solution for digital content creation. We added to our golf portfolio in April, working on location with Wazee Digital (formally T3Media) on a major golf event held in Augusta. In June, deltatre was first to use the Forscene / Microsoft Azure fully virtualised platform on the largest athletics event held in 2015 in Azerbaijan. Later that same month, we announced Forscene’s selection as part of a global sports brands clipping workflow on a three-year agreement starting August 2015.
Rugby World Cup
But as a born-and-bred South African and staunch Springbok supporter, my standout project for 2015 was definitely the Rugby World Cup. We provided additional Forscene capacity and licencing to the IMG Digital team to create official Rugby World Cup digital video content throughout the tournament – and while the Springboks narrowly avoided an early exit, I’m pleased to say that Forscene never dropped the ball.
Hailed as the most successful Rugby World Cup ever, this year’s tournament was also the most digitally engaged Rugby World Cup to date. Social media activity during the 2015 pool stages exceeded that of the whole of the 2011 New Zealand Rugby World Cup’s and #RWC2015 was used twice a second for the duration of the event. A major contributor to this digital success was the availability of video content online and on social platforms – there were over 270 million video views on all social media channels, the website attracted 25 million unique users and the official App was downloaded 2.8 million times with use in 204 nations. What’s even more impressive is that the team responsible for creating all the official digital video content consisted of just four editors working on standard laptops.
The workflow was simple and efficient. Forscene servers were installed on-premise at IMG’s Stockley Park facility in West London, which was serving as the tournament’s broadcast centre. As the live broadcast feeds streamed into the facility, the Forscene servers transcoded the full resolution HD-SDI feeds and uploaded proxy live feeds into the IMG Forscene accounts. IMG’s team of four editors started editing these feeds in Forscene seconds behind the live growing file – creating match edits, in-match clips and post-match interview and press conference highlights. Pre-made graphic stings and sponsor branding elements were incorporated into the edits before the final conformed sequences were published via World Rugby’s Pulse CMS to the official Rugby World Cup website. While the workflow was simple, the volume and quality of video content produced by the IMG digital production team over the course of the 24 Rugby World Cup match-days was astounding.
Forscene has once again proven its worth on one of the biggest sporting events of the year. We look forward to servicing our exciting 2016 agreements and are confident in growing Forscene rapidly as the sports digital content editing tool of choice.
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Jon Hanford - Group CTO, Deltatre