German’s Bundesliga football league is leveraging a number of media and AI services from Amazon Web Services to drive its Interactive Feed for fans.
The feed is built on TeraVolt’s TVXRAY AI-based SaaS solution which can easily integrated into OTT and used on any device.
It personalises the audience experience, automatically populating the viewer’s screen with custom video alerts, statistics, and graphics.
The Interactive Feed comprises more than six statistical widgets that feature information ranging from pictures and results to match facts and formations. Viewers can also access highlights, progress bar, and multigame mode.
During the coverage of each live game, a database collects more than 40 match highlight clips, which are made available for viewers to watch on-demand via a “fixtures and results” graphic within the Interactive Feed.
Each highlight contains its own relevance factor, said AWS, allowing fans to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.
“We live in a digital age in which modern fans crave interactive, personalised content experiences that mirror what they get from mobile apps. Yet, a mobile device isn’t optimal for watching live sport due to the small screen and encoded graphics,” said Steffen Merkel, DFL EVP of Audiovisual Rights. “Interactive Feed solves for small screen challenges, enabling us to capture all the data a viewer needs to follow a match and arrange it in a way that’s easily digested alongside live video coverage in one interface.”
AWS said that during each match broadcast, the Interactive Feed’s underlying architecture automatically detects real-time highlights, like a goal or an assist, using an algorithm that organises the data and makes it accessible to audiences as small icons in the timeline at the bottom of the viewport.
Clickable on-air graphics reveal statistical information about players and teams, ball possession, and other tactical details, even from games outside of the current view.
Behind-the-scenes, these capabilities are enabled via a software development kit (SDK), which is layered on top of the provider’s online video platform, CDN, the video stream, and front-end player or app framework. The transparent layer is integrated into a video player, and the solution then automatically synchronises the video and data to ensure a seamless viewing experience, which is all done using computer vision in AWS, said the company.
The backend infrastructure employs an AWS Relational Database (RDS) layer. Amazon Simple Storage (Amazon S3) is used for publishing purposes and keeping state (a temporal property of a process) in an AWS Elastic Kubernetes (EKS) cluster, upon which the entire solution is built.
Amazon ElastiCache accelerates performance with microsecond latency, especially for compute intensive operations, and AWS Application Load Balancer automatically distributes incoming application traffic. One of the REST APIs is then cached by the Amazon CloudFront CDN, while the others are routed through directly.
Within the architecture, AWS Elasticsearch enables logging, while a Prometheus open-source monitoring database within the EKS cluster is visualised over Grafana. Grafana dashboards also examine Amazon CloudWatch metrics, added AWS.
“We wanted to take a modern approach to this fan-first feature, and that meant we’d need top notch backend technology, as well as a third party to help with ongoing maintenance, which is why TVXRAY and AWS made for a smart choice,” added Merkel. “The technologies worked as expected, and it’s been an incredible experience every step of the way.”
