Royal Belgian FA uses EVS MediaHub to give clients fast, efficient access to their complete archive, creating opportunities to monetise and market relevant content to different partners.
David Van Campenhout is head of content and media at the Royal Belgian Football Association. The mission of the Association is to organise and develop football in Belgium. “We have decided to really nurture and work with our brands,” David said.
“The RFBA itself has a brand, of course, but we have some ‘love’ brands as well that attract a loyal following. We have the Belgian Red Devils (the national football team) and the Belgian Red Flames (the women’s national team). The focus now is on monetising our teams, achieving the maximum revenue, and in order to support that effort, we have set up a dedicated content division.”
The RBFA’s content consists not only of live match footage but also a lot of what he calls shoulder cam-style, handheld footage, giving the organisation a lot of behind-the-scenes material. David said, “It's important to have methods in place to gain access to these different types of content in one central location, especially since many demands are now coming from production companies and TV stations who want specific kinds of images.
Efficiency with Marketing Options
“While looking out for tools to increase our efficiency when organising and searching for images, we came across EVS MediaHub, which allows our teams to give clients easier access to our complete archive in an efficient way. It also gives us the opportunity to really market relevant content to different partners. It has become a mini business case in that helps us share and monetise the content that we already have.”
The MediaHub cloud-based SaaS platform extends the reach of live events by publishing and distributing non-linear live, monetisable content to rights holders online. It supports RBFA as a content owner by virtualising the physical infrastructure of an IBC in the EVS Hybrid Cloud, but maintains the quality and ease of use of an onsite deployment. For the Association’s clients, MediaHub helps content takers and rights holders become more effective and efficient in their remote production workflows, and includes a suite of media functions to meet international digital and broadcast production requirements.
Jonathan Vanooteghem, content creator at the RBFA, described how working with MediaHub makes it easier for the department to retrieve footage very quickly. “Now, just by typing Romelu Lukaku (the national team’s top scorer) into the system, we can find everything about every game that he scored in quite easily,” Jonathan said. “Every minute that we spend adding metadata to the system probably gains us 20 minutes of searching time by instantly finding the right footage for the right video.
“We started to use MediaHub during the World Cup in in Qatar in December 2022. We were shooting and uploading a lot of content at the base camp with the Red Devils in Qatar, and our team here in Belgium was able to download, with just one click, any of the content we were shooting in Qatar.”
User Profiles
That ability was not only very useful in itself but also proof that they only needed an internet connection to get started on a project – first, to upload a video to the system and after that, their editors could access whatever portion of it they needed – whether it was just a small piece, or a full video download. “The point is, it's very efficient and it allows our team to be more productive in a short amount of time,” said Jonathan.
“We set up a series of different user profiles to fit the needs of everybody within the Football Association. Some of us need access to the video for editing, like in my team, but some of our colleagues need to make presentations and want to include specific footage from time to time.
“Likewise, our Sports Department often performs video analysis and might need videos of a certain player, for example. In that case we can gather suitable footage in a bin and then share the bin with internal and external partners. So actually, we can have partners located anywhere in the world. Once they have an internet connection, they are able to see the bins and download the footage whenever it’s needed.”
Data Analysis and AI
Over time, MediaHub is becoming more useful to the RBFA in different ways, for instance by integrating multiple sources based on AI tagging and metadata generation. As well as the metadata that Jonathan’s team adds themselves, they are now adding the data supplied by the data analysis department. He said, “We can clip and log everything that's happening in the game footage, which makes it easier for us to retrieve goals, corners or other actions performed by a certain player.
“On the other hand, we also have a new AI tool coming up, based on facial recognition. It will mean that, in our system where we already have so much material on our players, now we can use the AI tool to retrieve footage of each player through recognition of his or her face. Having these two new tools in the system will allow us to make the best use of our time and resources." evs.com
