The International Paralympic Committee has appointed Egoli Media, the artificial intelligence-enabled technology and Media Company, in a wide-ranging deal that includes the digitization of over 8,000 hours of archive footage from 1992 onwards.
Announcing the four-year deal this morning, the IPC said that Egoli would “transform its content management, increase accessibility and create new monetization and storytelling opportunities”.
Egoli, which is based in Los Angeles and London and was founded last year by industry executive Caroline Rowland, will use its AI software to digitize and automatically log, tag, and categorize all IPC-owned content to ensure “better and faster” access to footage.
Up to 1,500 hours of the live broadcast world feeds and non-televised footage from this summer’s rescheduled Tokyo 2020 Paralympics will also be annotated and categorized via Egoli’s ‘Annotation’ engine, which will scan content and automatically log and tag it.
Further content from the IPC’s various World Para Sports championships will be digitized and cataloged, along with associated photography and reports.
The IPC’s digital archive is currently marketed exclusively by IMG. The agency’s IMG Replay arm was appointed to a four-year representation agreement in May 2017. Gravity Media, the London-based broadcast services company, has housed the IPC archive.
Footage digitized by Egoli will be made available for licensing and download by Paralympic stakeholders and interested parties via a management library. Crowd celebrations, medal ceremonies, in-stadium coverage and outside competition footage will also be available.
The tie-up with Egoli, which runs until December 31, 2024, will open up the possibility of generating new revenue streams by increasing accessibility and enabling the sustained use of valuable, underutilized hours of content, the IPC said today (Wednesday). Along with rights-holders and in-house teams, the IPC said that the Egoli technology is also of benefit to sponsors, with the inventory of all brands and logos featured at Paralympics to be cataloged.
In their joint announcement, the IPC and Egoli pointed to a secondary content market in a sport worth $6.2bn.
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