Football fans are ferocious in their appetite for the latest news and videos about their favourite club. With the rise of social media, digital streaming and club-branded linear TV channels, the need to keep up a constant flow of content has only increased. Feeding that monster means that clubs need a reliable media storage facility to store their latest assets as well as archive material.
Liverpool Football Club (LFC) began partnering with Wasabi three years ago. The most successful football club in England utilises the company’s cloud technology to identify, organise, and categorise files, as well as tag and tailor content. LFC was already using Wasabi technology, but the club’s digital team wanted to find a better way of solving some of their archive storage problems. “We wanted to prevent the 24-spinning disk environment in an office,” explains Drew Crisp, SVP of digital at LFC. “Covid, in that sense, helped us accelerate a few things and therefore using Wasabi and starting on that journey was a very obvious answer.”
Crisp’s role encompasses the media side of LFC, including linear channel LFC TV and OTT platform LFC TV Go, as well as partnerships and marketing, and all of the club’s product development, technology and infrastructure. “We use Wasabi for the majority, if not all, of our content storage in the media space,” he explains. “We also ingest a lot of the games that we record into Wasabi so that we can work on them after the final whistle. We use Wasabi as a corporate backup solution so that should anything happen, we have our organisation in one place, so to speak.”
On average, the club produces 100 pieces of content across its social media channels a week. Depending on the first team’s schedule, the linear channel and OTT platform could broadcast two matches a week with both a pre- and post-match show, plus highlights and interviews. “It’s in the hundreds of pieces of content that go out in varying different guises each week,” Crisp explains. “Also, a lot of our archive is stored in Wasabi. There’s a continual feed of archive content that goes into Wasabi that we can access and edit to create pieces. I think we’re currently at 1.2 petabytes of content storage.”
LFC opted for cloud storage over on-prem because of the speed of access and accessibility. Crisp says that was always the plan, but the pandemic helped accelerate the move. “It wasn’t sustainable for editors to come into the office and download content from physical servers onto big remote hard drives so they could work. The move to Wasabi cloud absolutely transformed how quickly people could access content and what they could do remotely.
“Now we’re very much in a flexible model. I like people to be in the office three days a week. I think that human interaction from a content point of view creates good content because you challenge each other and come up with ideas, and you can’t do that alone. I think that kind of exploratory, creative thinking is much better in person, but we recognise that everyone has got used to flexibility.”
Salah scores
Before partnering with Liverpool, Wasabi had worked with a number of sports organisations in the United States. But according to Whit Jackson, VP of media and entertainment at Wasabi, LFC is unique in its scale of content creation. “That has forced our hand a bit,” he admits.
To keep up with demand, in April 2024 the company launched Wasabi AiR, object storage powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. The solution enables LFC to create a “laundry list” of metadata, from the players included, spoken words, keywords, tags, and logos, as well as speech to text rundown of every word spoken in the broadcast
“That index then becomes a really powerful search tool, so if Mo Salah slots in a goal and there might have been a moment where the Wasabi logo was visible in the stadium, the user can easily find the footage they’re looking for,” explains Jackson.
LFC is currently using Wasabai AiR across ingested match content as a starting point and will gradually apply it to their archive. “To give you an example, before we started using the solution, after every game, somebody would rewatch the game and then write down minute by minute when a certain partner appeared on the LED and send this long spreadsheet to someone else who would get the game, and then create all of the different clips for us to able to say to a partner, this is when you appeared,” says Crisp.
“It was honestly three days of Excel and editing pain. Now we can push a button, and it’s done literally within probably 30 seconds, but the reality is, it’s more like three. The power of it is really, really impressive. It’s allowing our editors to spend more time on being creative rather than some of the operational process aspects.”
Crisp can already see ways in which Wasabi AiR can help LFC in the future, describing a scenario where the club could use the technology to let fans create their own content in the same way the club’s editors do now. “How do you build a front end that would actually create a football archive that’s accessible?” he muses. “There are lots of licensing rights challenges in that but you could overcome it. From my perspective, that’s really exciting.”
He is also keen to integrate Wasabi AiR into LFC’s media asset management system. “To have it integrated into our MAM, which is then integrated into our editing suite, is really powerful because then we’re applying AiR at the source. We don’t have to ingest it into the MAM before we use it, it can immediately go into our editing suite and we can make some tweaks, add some overlays, and bang, we can publish it. In an ideal world, that’s where we’d be.”
Wasabi is keen to continue working with the club to reach its goals, says Jackson, and is aiming to deliver integrations with certain MAMs in a timely manner. “Some other things that have come out of this engagement include new feature sets, like speech-to-text, but the natural language description is also very helpful as well. In a football match that could be: several men on the field with a football, the grass is green, it appears to be Anfield, all of that. But it can also find moments such as the players getting on a bus, walking across the street, a pub scene, things of that nature.
“If you’re looking for those kinds of clips, you’re not searching again just for the people that you want to see, but now trying to find them within some context. We’ll continue to expand on that as we go forward.”
