FOX Sports and Google Cloud Revolutionize Content Archives with AI Technology

FOX Sports and Google Cloud Revolutionize Content Archives with AI Technology

For nearly three decades, FOX Sports has been accumulating an immense amount of video footage within its content archives. Millions of hours of sports-related content span across these archives, and historically, individuals have been tasked with the onerous job of sorting through this vast collection to produce new content. However, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), this once labor-intensive task has become much more efficient. FOX Sports recently announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, harnessing their generative AI technology known as Vertex AI Vision to unlock the full potential of its content archives.

Anil Jain, Global Managing Director of Strategic Consumer Industries at Google Cloud, expressed his excitement about the collaboration, stating, “They’re using what’s called the intelligence assets service, which is a solution we built together using Google Cloud’s and AI’s search capabilities to really change the game, if you will, in terms of how they produce content.”

Traditionally, retrieving a specific piece of content from the archives required physically going to a different location. FOX Sports Senior Vice President, Production Operations Dustin Myers explained, “We had a media management system, and we didn’t have everything in it. We had records from the last four or five years, but if you were looking to go back to 1995, you would have to drive down to a vault that was 15 to 20 minutes away… you’d have to pour through tapes, and look through an antiquated database system to try and find things.”

That’s when FOX Sports went on a mission to find a company that could transform the way they approached their work. After talking to numerous companies, they connected with Google and pitched the idea of revolutionizing the storytelling process. Myers said, “We explained to them that it’s really a miserable process to tell stories, and it’s very labor-intensive.”

The deployment of Vertex AI Vision enables FOX Sports to ingest content quickly while also analyzing millions of hours of game footage. Notably, the technology allows users to search for content based on commentary. This means that a key moment from a World Series several years ago could be easily located by inputting the words the broadcaster used at that time. Once the desired video content is found, it can be utilized across various platforms, such as broadcast television, social media, and marketing assets.

Myers added, “The idea was to take our entire library and dump it into the cloud, run machine learning models on it, and essentially use [Google’s] search power to find what we need. Fast-forward to 2022, and we rolled it out in the World Cup in Qatar… We searched by [announcer] Joe Davis' call. It was ‘the swing of his life.’ So we just went in the interface and typed ‘swing of his life,’ and we got the clip from the game, we got the other angles of it because it does speech to text.”

The incorporation of AI technology into FOX Sports' daily workflow is expected to have a long-lasting and positive impact. Brad Zager, FOX Sports President of Production/Operations and Executive Producer, lauded the addition of automation, stating, “With Google Cloud, we’re able to utilize video search, advanced machine learning, and artificial intelligence to automate one of the most manual processes in sports media: tagging and searching video content. Compared to previous media management workflows, our team is able to swiftly find relevant content, which is critical in the business of live sports.”

In today’s fast-paced world, keeping the audience engaged has become increasingly challenging. However, AI technology has provided organizations like FOX Sports with powerful tools to stay on the cutting edge. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian affirmed this, saying, “By choosing Google Cloud’s AI technologies, Fox Sports is not only maximizing its content production capabilities but also delivering transformative viewing experiences that keep its audiences engaged and entertained.”

The partnership between FOX Sports and Google Cloud is revolutionizing content archives by leveraging AI technology. With the ability to efficiently search and produce relevant video content from their vast archives, FOX Sports is poised to provide captivating sports coverage that keeps audiences enthralled.