With sports teams looking to provide a fast and rich experience for fans across the world, having access to their content is a vital need – but with games, training sessions and even commercial appearances on the go round the clock, getting hold of the right content at the right time can be tricky.
One of the most iconic names in world football, Liverpool FC has been working with Wasabi to transform its cloud storage capabilities, giving it the ability to create content like never before, and the pair invited TechRadar Pro to the club’s AXA Training Centre to find out more.
Scoring an upgrade
The relationship began during the pandemic, where the club’s media production needed to move from an on-premise set-up to something more flexible by moving operations to the cloud.
“It was critically important to us, going forward, to be able to do more in terms of our audience connection and storytelling,” says Andy Fletcher, VP Technology & Digital Products at Liverpool FC.
The club has its own television channel, LFCTV, which broadcasts 24/7 to millions of households across more than 90 countries, and a huge social media presence reliant on the latest video and image content.
It uses Wasabi AiR not only to transfer and upload this content quickly and smoothly, turning what previously took days into just seconds, but also in terms of automatically tagging what the content actually shows.
This can be as simple as spotting which players are involved in a certain clip, who scores the goal or provides the assist, but can also focus on areas such as the specific competition a match is being played in, and the season it took place.
Crucially from a commercial perspective, Wasabi AiR can also tag when a specific sponsor’s logo or advert is displayed, giving these partners much more insight into how effective their placement has been.
“It has fundamentally changed the way we do business in that space,” Fletcher notes, claiming the technology has saved “well over 5000 hours” saved across the team over the course of a year.
The content isn’t just from the latest games, either – “the club has a huge, huge archive of data, terabytes of data going back over decades that we can call upon to make those stories richer,” Fletcher notes.
“We’ve got a fantastic relationship with Liverpool FC,” says David Boland, VP Innovation Marketing and Market Intelligence at Wasabi, “but I spend a lot of my time talking to other organizations and they are all moving in the same direction, where they want to add value to their fanbase and the fans with some stickiness – this can be apps, or any kind of in-stadium, on-venue activities, and a lot of that has to do with uncovering hidden gems from the content they have.”
“There’s a lot of value in taking that archive footage, moving it to the cloud and making it readily accessible for folks – and most of that begins with having a cloud storage solution.”
Boland notes how Wasabi’s vision was to give customers access to their data from the cloud, wherever or whenever they are, with no egress charges, no data retrieval charges, or API charges.
“We see a lot of organizations are interested in adding value to the content they have stored, and with the advent of new AI technology, such as being able to ask queries and get answers back using agents is something we see people are going to be doing a lot more of in the future…(and) there’s no tape involved, so it takes milliseconds for you to access that data.”
Fletcher notes that the club operates a combination of cloud and on-prem storage – “predominantly, we move towards cloud storage, but as a business, there are some things that we have to do on-prem just because that’s the nature of the business around the stadium.”
“Wasabi AiR has enabled us to do that in a very different and a lot quicker way, and by doing that and removing a lot of manual processes in terms of tagging and automation, is allowing us to spend more time on that storytelling and ultimately the audience connection piece that adds value to us as a club,” he added.
“This all of course future-proofs us from the transformation going forward, and drives a consistent way of working, an infrastructure we can scale – and it’s way more resilient that we have before, and it’s really setting us up for the next five or ten years in terms of how we’re looking at things.”
“When Wasabi partnered with LFC, people definitely stood up and took notice,” Boland concludes, “word of mouth is definitely important in the sports market…(and) when sport teams tell you what tech they use, people stand up and take notice.”
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