Dalet Flex gives CA media workflows to help upgrade and expand its content production and enhance fan engagement, and adopt AI to monetise its historical archives efficiently.
Cricket Australia (CA) is the national governing body for the sport of cricket in Australia, and has become responsible for curating, producing and expanding a variety of cricket-related content. The move is part of CA’s 2022-2027 Strategic Plan, which encompasses efforts to upgrade their media operations and deliver a genuine fan experience in tune with cricket enthusiasts across the nation.
Cricket Australia particularly wanted to replace their previous media asset management tools, which had reached end-of-life. Increasing productivity and delivering higher volumes of content with their existing teams was also part of their strategy. With decades of irreplaceable archives, it was important for CA to preserve and take better advantage of the value of their historical library.
Asset Management Update
“A key element of our Strategic Plan is to deliver top quality experiences to our member clubs and their participants, with data and analytics as key enablers – something we can only achieve by working with the right technology partners,” said Dan Allan, senior content manager, Broadcast, Cricket Australia.
“With Dalet’s system we are upgrading our operations further and reducing on-premises infrastructure. For instance, we can avoid significant content duplication, which saves on storage, and regained control of our historical content. Removing these concerns means our creative teams have time to focus on their talent for delivering engaging content that unites and inspires people to love and play cricket.”
Dalet’s software is in use by other governing sports bodies as well, both in Australia at the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League, and elsewhere including the Italian Premier Football League, French Football League and others. During their market evaluation, this fact weighed in on CA’s decision to choose Flex for their content management.
Running on Dalet Flex software and deployed on Microsoft Azure, the organisation’s upgrade prevents falling into technical debt – that is, repeatedly taking short cuts or using workarounds to meet delivery deadlines – and operational drag, the small inefficiencies of handling media that add up to wasted time.
Using the centralised, combined Flex system for ingest, AI-driven asset management, transcoding and delivery helps to optimise Cricket Australia’s production and distribution workflows. Both archive and production content, distributed across disparate storage locations, has been aggregated into a central repository. This configuration saves time and resources compared to the previous archive workflow.
AI Analysis and Indexing
The Dalet Flex platform incorporates AI analysis from Dalet Media Cortex, an integrated AI engine, to index both live and archived content for speech-to-text transcription, closed caption generation, cataloguing of players’ faces and brand recognition. All of this indexing and metadata tagging contributes to finding content for specific applications, leading to monetisation, and is accessed through tools in Dalet Flex, Pyramid and Galaxy five.
AI-based caption generation
Automating workflows makes sure that relevant content is delivered to the right audiences across a range of platforms, a task that is growing more complex as platforms proliferate. Automation also facilitates fast turnaround of live event highlights to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as to Cricket Australia’s webpage.
Dalet Flex also supports a number of relevant third-party integrations with commonly used tools such as live replays from EVS, Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, and Opta by Stats Perform for sports data import. With the integations in place, CA’s creative teams can maintain their attention to production.
“Dalet has extensive expertise helping sporting teams, leagues and federations – we know what matters to them and how ensuring their stakeholders and followers continue to enjoy historical archives is key,” said Ren Middleton, VP Sales - APAC at Dalet. “We have worked with Cricket Australia to deliver a set-up that enhances productivity and accelerates time-to-market while opening the door to new revenue opportunities.” www.dalet.com
