I’m Andrew Reich with Zixi. I’m joined by Ross Tanner. Yeah. Ross Tanner. Senior Vice President at, Magnifi. I essentially run Europe, Middle East, and Africa. And, yeah, I’ve been with the business around almost three years now. And I kind of look after anything commercial focused and partnership focused within that kind of territory that I just mentioned. But, yeah, I have a long history in sports broadcasting. Once upon a time, I was a producer myself creating content, not just live content, but post produced content, documentary style content all in sports. And then, yeah, transitioned into the sports data world, actually. So it was with the Stats Perform business for many years, commercializing their data to a lot of broadcasters, federations, leagues in the market. And then in more recent times, obviously, the AI space, which is obviously a hot topic for everyone. So, yeah, very much a rounded experience, which hopefully are applied back into the industry when we try and work with different players in the industry. So I wanna and and we were talking a little bit before, and I’m and I’m very intrigued by this because being a producer and coming from the production space myself, you being a producer in that world, you know, you’re almost like the leader of the control room. You’re relying on many different components and personnel to come together to produce and operate the best show. Yeah. So now that you’re, you know, looking at the industry from a different lens, how is that, you know, transition been for you? And if you could discuss some of the, you know, unique observations, that would be great. I think first and foremost, because I’ve sat in that chair, I kind of understand the production workflows in great detail. Obviously, they’ve evolved much in the last sort of five to ten years. I think the main thing that’s different to when I was doing it ten to fifteen years ago, we were predominantly thinking about linear TV broadcasting. YouTube and Facebook just came into the industry around that time to, what, fifteen, twenty years ago now. And so there was only really those platforms that needs to be considered, whereas these days trying to publish content to TikTok, to Facebook, to Instagram, to all the different platforms that exist. And by the way, now it’s not just sixteen by nine aspect ratio content. It’s one by one. It’s nine sixteen. It’s four to five. There’s so many different things that content creators and producers need to think about. Not just one platform. It could be an OTT. It could be all the socials I just mentioned. How do you become timely in getting content out, especially when it comes into what Magnifi does, which is very focused on the automation of clips and highlights. Right? How do you get content out in near real time and make sure you’re the first to market? And you can only really do that when there’s live concurrent streams when you use a solution like Magnifi. So I think the times have changed, of course, over the last ten, fifteen years when I left it, but applying my kind of industry kind of knowledge to when I did it back then. So thinking about how I would do it if I was producing the output. So if you’ve got say, you’re Sky Sports in the UK and you’ve got a multitude of different sports rights from the English Premier League through to various basketball and cricket rights, if you’re staffing that up to have multiple people producing the clips and highlights to go across all the platforms I mentioned, one, that’s probably gonna be cost prohibitive. Two, you’re not gonna get to market fast enough. And three, you basically wanna be using some kind of automation tool to make sure you get to that market first. The kind of importance of getting that content to social media to beat the competition or to beat piracy is a kind of key thing that we kind of message to market. So, yeah, they’re kind of main sort of things that we kind of sort of push to the market, really. It’s it’s so funny. I I can relate. I remember when I started, working for major broadcaster, in the United States, MLB and NHL Network. When I first started there early twenty tens, there was so much emphasis on live air, live television. We need this now for live TV. Live TV, we’re going live, this next block, the next segment. And there was so much emphasis on that in the linear side. And by the time, you know, towards the end of my time there, the end of the twenty tens, and early twenty twenties, it was, we need this highlight for, you know, Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. And it there it was just it completely the mindset changed and that that flexibility of, you know, really pushing content in more spaces and more areas to ultimately meet end end goal, which is the fan. You know, fans now are consuming content in so many different ways. So when you you said that, it it it brought me back a little bit as well. Absolutely. And the one the one other thing we always say at Magnifi, which is again using my kind of background and knowledge is actually sitting in that chair on an Avid suite or a Final Cut Yep. On a Premiere suite and simply doing match highlights is quite a mundane thing to do. Maybe you do it in EVS in a live studio environment wherever you do it, but it’s something that a kind of an AI tool like Magnifi can do today. And I think what we say to the industry is your creative heads, producers, APs, focus on the more tailored content that you may want to do to focus on different platforms. So that might be ancillary content that could be around different subject matters that exist within your program. So, yeah, we we very much say free up your creative heads to be creative. Let them be creative. News automation on bits, which is light clips and highlights, which should be, in our view, very much automated these days. Yeah. No. I I once again, another another statement that resonates with the you know, a lot of internships, spent time logging Yeah. Games and logging them by hand or freeing it Yeah. Yeah. Screening phone calls for radio stations. And I think about it, and I’m saying, you know, a lot of these AI automation tools, they’re now allowing, you know, interns to maybe learn different parts of the industry. So maybe instead of sitting there logging a baseball game or a basketball game by hand, you could be shadowing a producer, or you could be learning how to edit, or you could be learning how to operate some of these AI tools. And to your point, you could really use your mind more creatively versus. You know, logging. Again, there is a lot of value in that, and it it teaches you kind of the it gives you that structure and the organization and, you know, your eye for certain moments that you wanna, you know, work out with the producer and the editors, but there are other things perhaps that you could be working on. Absolutely. I think a lot of people are scared of AI in many ways, but I think what I’ve noticed from broadcasters certainly at the moment is they’re trying figure out ways to use AI in different ways. So a very basic level like ChatGPT, obviously, most people will use these days to to do different things. What I’ve noticed with broadcasters now, they’re actually creating new AI streams to do different things, to make things a lot easier, to get to the results they need to do. I think that’s ultimately what we say is, like, even if you’re not the highlights package not hundred percent perfect, actually, the speed, latency, and the price point you’re getting is probably better to to go down that path rather than expecting it to be perfect each time. So, yeah, I think the the very much the using AI in the right way and making sure you go on that journey with whoever it is, the producer or or anyone that sits within the broadcast workflow. It’s important to get on board with it and embrace it and understand it. For those that do, we feel that they’re the ones that are gonna be the winner, I think, in this in this kind of race as we go forward. So I would love to hear your perspective, you know, and I know you mentioned it a little bit, at at the top, but if you could dive in a little bit on what are some of the the key areas and things that Magnifi are really leaning into? Yeah. That would be great. Sure. So Magnifi have been around for around five years. We very much are a sports technology business. We work with over a hundred sports media rights owners or holders in the market. They vary from FIFA to Wimbledon tennis championships through to the Danish football leagues through to FloSports based in the US. So we’re very much entrenched into the marketplace. Our system really focuses on the scalability of clips and highlights at scale. We also provide rich metadata that comes with each clip. So say, for example, each clip will include the competition ID. It will include the team names involved, and it will include the actual moment that takes place in the game itself. So that could be a goal score by Manchester United in the twelfth minute by Bruno Fernandes, for example. And it would have the timecode in and timecode out. And that metadata can be leveraged in many different ways. So for example, it can be used as with search within a MAM archive facility. So if you’re trying to unearth moments from the past, our kind of metadata really helps bring that to the fore for producers and editors to kind of bring things to life again. Second bit, which I think is more compelling, and this goes down the pathway of personalization, is our metadata can be used and matched to first party data on the broadcast sides with an OTT player, for example. So if you’ve got a series of clips that come from Magnifi that are meta tags, that metadata can be tagged alongside the first party data of the broadcaster. So if I’m Ross Tanner, I log in to X platform. My preferences are Manchester United Premier League and so on and so forth. Our metadata can really serve up, when married with that first party data, a personalized experience. And that’s kind of the narrative that we kind of go down with with our kind of customers. In terms of what’s new, what we’re really focused on is using AI to be better at providing content experiences in our solution. So whilst we’re fully focused on end to end automation of clips and highlights at scale, we have a web based platform where customers can come in. They can see the automated content. They can edit it in our platform. They can have bumpers, stings, logos, and then publish it accordingly to different platforms. Within that, we’ve got open source AI models, which essentially allow you to create automatic transcriptions. We do AI commentary. So we’ll listen to commentary, say, in English language, and that can be repurposed into French, German, Italian, and many different languages. The reason why that’s super important, just to touch on it quickly, is if you’re a governing body or a global broadcaster, you may have your core markets, which may be, say, the UK, US. But as a a governing body, really wanna focus on getting into the German market, for example. Yep. Now the cost to produce a commentary feed in German may be prohibitive perhaps. So with an AI commentator feed, you can really get into that market quite quickly by using a commentator feed or transcription subtitling on top of the video itself. They’re kind of two areas that we’re really focused on inside. How can we use AI in different areas, commentator feeds, or whether that be transcriptions or subtitling to really enhance the kind of regionalization of the content. Right? So two key buzzwords, personalization and regionalization. They’re the kind of the key focus for Magnifi. Away from sport, and this is kind of a bigger topic, we in the last 6 to 12 months, we’ve co-developed a new solution with two European broadcasters. And that is really split into, two or three key areas. So number one is taking a live twenty four seven news channel. Let’s take Sky News in the UK as an example. We would ingest that as an RTMP SRT feed live, and our system would auto detect chapters within the news program itself. So say the top story is, Donald Trump wins US election. And to camera, he’s speaking for the presenters this is speaking for sixty seconds. We would find a clean in point and clean out point of that chapter. So we’re not changing the editorial narrative of that tool. It’s as it’s been produced in the studio. Once that’s got the chapterization of that content, we then add rich metadata to it. So any program IDs, any keywords like Donald Trump, politics, news, and so on and so forth. And then we resize it into nine by sixteen aspect ratio. And then the same principle applies to sport, which I just talked about, which is the content will go over an API into an OTT platform, and then personalization exists. So we’re matching the our metadata with first party data to provide that rich experience for the user. We think for commercial broadcasters, providing more inventory to put free, mid, and post roll advertising alongside it and providing regular news content is kind of a real big growth area and I think a challenge. Because a lot of the people we speak to with commercial broadcasters is like, we need to do more for less, and we need to be able to commercialize more of the content. How do we do that without spending more money? How do we not affect the journalists making the content? Because the argument back to them is that we’re not changing the story here. We’re simply providing a clean and clean out of the actual story that’s been said in the studio itself, which, by the way, has been produced already. And and, no, that that’s that’s great. And I one one thing that one piece that you you hit on that really I’m I’m very passionate about is, you know, the the regionalization and the personalization Yeah. Aspect. Because for me and, you know, from the United States, you’re starting to see more alternate broadcasts and catering live sports to different types of fans. You know, we’ve seen the NHL do a big city greens broadcast. What is your perspective on alternate broadcasts? And and have you been seeing that in in in your area as well? I mean, I when I was producing content, it was generally one to many. It was very much I produce a piece of content. It’d be sent to whoever sees it at any given time. With the way technology works these days, which has improved so much, we’re algorithmic focused. So the ability to use metadata, the ability to use first party data, algorithms, of course, marrying that altogether and providing, like you mentioned, different experiences. But I really see the future of, like, I really wanna watch the content I wanna watch, and there needs to be different maybe watch along programs along with the main broadcast. And I can switch between what I wanna watch at any given point in time. So I think because technology has improved and because the metadata and the data has improved and the algorithms, of course, I think there’ll be a kind of a very, very kind of hyper personalized kind of stream that can exist. And I think we were talking about the other day, like, there’s almost gonna be, like, a a million streams that could be aggregated from different sources and brought into kind of an experience that you can kinda choose at any given point. Well, and and a lot of, you know, a lot of fans now too are very interested in in the analytics and the data parts of of sports. And so, you know, that’s another you’re seeing a lot of data cast. So I see that it’s important to be flexible and, you know, adapt to where the the fans and the consumers wanna go. And I think that’s where, you know, the technology providers really need to be agile and nimble in that space to really be able to provide, you know, more experiences for fans and ultimately help leagues to grow their games and and grow the sport. It’s really interesting point because there’s a lot of focus at the moment on watch along programs. So whereby you’ll have certain fans that watch their team and club. They’re really popular in Europe at the moment. We’ve seen quite a few kind of advancements in actually the UK where certain watch along YouTube sort of programs, they’re actually acquiring sports media rights to funnel through some of the clip rights in the programs themselves. So I think a lot of leagues are getting more savvy around this area and wanting to maybe think around different ways to distribute rights into different environments where the audience exists. So it’s not long ago just providing broadcast rights into broadcast environments in a traditional way. It’s looking at different ways to to make things interesting and find new audiences. So the Bundesliga have been very good at that actually recently. But, Gischka, one quick point before you go back in is the providing a data enriched broadcast that you mentioned coming from the ops businesses I did back in the day. That very much see different experiences that can be derived through through event data or in different ways to present the data, to engage the audience in different ways. Not everyone really likes the kind of hard data, but providing different experiences, whether that’s fun led to watch long shows or whether that’s more data rich shows. Again, it’s just finding what works for the right sort of audience at any given time. And it’s that second screen experience or third screen experience, whatever you wanna call it. And and you you mentioned something about, you know, the rights and distribution and how that’s all changing and the importance, again, of being flexible from with that in mind and from your both what you’re seeing now and then, you know, your perspective as a producer. How important is it for, you know, technology providers as ourselves to be reliable and flexible, whether it’s, you know, we’re talking about Zixie with, you know, with with streaming and video distribution and contribution and getting reliable streams or, you know, from the Magnifi perspective of quick, you know, highlight, assembly and and AI automation. How important is that? Do you see that as for for technology providers for these leagues? Yeah, I think so. I think technology has improved obviously. When I was doing live production, it was all in a truck. Obviously, if you look at it now, you’ve got cloud based production. You’ve got AI based cameras. So it’s completely evolved and changed. So ultimately, you want storytellers to be empowered by different technology that allows them to do different things to appease the different audiences and markets. So, yeah, I think the introduction of cloud production is a is a kind of if that becomes more stable and can really do live cloud productions in different ways without guessing a big truck in place, I think that just opens up all the long tail of sport in terms of production that already exists today, but I think that will only improve as as the kind of technology improves as well. And that’s the same with AI cameras. They’re they’re they’re they’re a nice entry point into the market, but how do they improve into the future? Do they become more intuitive? Do they learn better? Do they track better? At the moment, from my understanding, just single camera productions, but do they become multi camera switched cameras and tracking ball tracking and stuff like that? That’s the bit which I think could change the game certainly in live production. And what about in terms of, you know, video distribution, being able to, enable leagues to distribute content anywhere or, again, personalized content, more clip item automation or personalized highlights? How do you see, you know, both the personalized highlights and, the distribution of of video continuing to be more important? Yeah. The one the one other innovation that we’re working on at the moment is taking a sixteen by nine stream of sport, and this can be the same with news content as well. We’re actually gonna be restreaming content in nine by sixteen live into any social media or OTT channels. So, again, it’s like a lot of the problems exist. Right? It’s how do you do that in a kind of production workflow at the moment. At the moment, that’s really difficult to do. Whereas our technology is built to track ball or built to focus on a contributor in frame on a nine by sixteen frame. So we think just finding ways to know where the audience of tomorrow is gonna be and just really figuring out, like, we know that the nine by sixteen experience is where a lot of people scroll on their mobile phone, And that’s why we’re very much thinking about that. And, again, it just comes back into how the metadata is structured along with the first party data so you can retarget content at any given time. Yeah. And, ultimately, I think, you know, it’s it’s important for, you know, really the the technology to enable leagues and broadcasters to provide, a better experience for their fans. Whether that’s more content or more personalized content, I think that’s really, you know, big emphasis right now. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’ll only continue. I think again, the audience demands that on the social media platforms, it kind of already exists because it’s such a high volume of content. Whenever you scroll on TikTok or Instagram, you’re, you’re kind of seeing what you’ve seen before. And obviously the algorithm brings up new content, but I’m really intrigued around the OTT side of things and how nine by sixteen experiences are becoming ever more popular. That’s an area which I think will grow certainly with leagues and feds. A lot of them are using that, but how does that scale across the different areas of sport into leagues and and even broadcasters? Because my view is that nine by sixteen should be an experience for anyone on any platform at any given time, not just on social media, of course. So that’s that’s an area I think will grow as well. Awesome. Well, any anything else you wanna add or talk about? Or No. I I think that’s that’s that’s covered quite a few topics. Great. Well, really appreciate it, Ross. Thanks for coming by and yeah, have a great rest of your IBC. No problem. Thanks for having us.