Sports Loft

Hot on the heels of an excellent Product Byte event in London yesterday, hosted by our good friends at Monterosa, the team is busy packing for IBC - International Broadcasting Convention later this week. If you're heading over to Amsterdam as well, get in touch if you'd like to discuss what's new and possible in sports, media and entertainment.

More than 250 million people worldwide live with blindness or a visual impairment – including ~7 million in the US alone. But despite around 30% of this community being avid sports fans, few tools exist to help them engage with their favourite sports. That’s where OneCourt comes in. The innovative haptic device allows fans to follow sporting action by feel, converting live game data into a series of moving vibrations. In this week’s Sports Loft Podcast, Yanni Andreopoulos and Charlie Greenwood chat with Antyush Bollini, co-founder and COO of OneCourt. Spun out of the University of Washington, OneCourt recently worked with T-Mobile at the MLB All-Star Game and is now finalising its latest investment round, with backers like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on board. 🎧 Listen here: https://pod.fo/e/25dc3d

How do you ensure that content created with AI is accurate? Generative AI often struggles with making images that match company logos or specific products. That's a problem if you want to use gen AI in advertising or marketing. One approach that could address these issues is ‘retrieval augmentation generation’ (RAG) – and it's gaining an increasing amount of attention. We dug into #RAG in the latest edition of the Sports Loft Newsletter. Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/gy6ruFe Read it here: https://lnkd.in/e-jMh4yK? In this edition: 🎙️ OneCourt – helping visually impaired fans experience sports 🚀 Our takeaways from Google's latest event 👋 Events we're heading to in September 🤓 Our recommended reads

The popularity of TikTok, Instagram and Snap Inc. has normalised vertical video as a format, with the average TikTok user spending two and a half hours per day* watching videos on the app. In a recent Sports Loft Podcast, Yanni Andreopoulos and Charlie Greenwood were joined by Bob Thomson, founder of Storyteller, to delve into why vertical video has become so popular and the opportunities for sports teams to use it on their own apps and websites. Storyteller clients, such as the LA Rams and FC Barcelona, have seen positive results in terms of increased engagement and video views after implementing Storyteller. And the platform offers opportunities for commercialisation, including sponsored content and full-screen ads. Listen now: https://pod.fo/e/258b0a

Could providing data for training AI models be a revenue opportunity for sports? The past few weeks have seen a slew of stories in which publishers and platforms have accused #AI firms of using their content to train models without their permission. These cases may lead to increased restrictions around using publicly available data to train AI models. This comes at a time when AI models are close to exhausting the available online data. So what does this mean for #sports and #media organisations? Find out in our latest edition of the Sports Loft Newsletter. https://lnkd.in/eWXYSdFc Plus: 📱 New podcast: How teams and leagues can utilise vertical video  🥇  Powerade x Simone Biles 🤖  AI for influencers 🎤 Upcoming events 

"I can put a camera looking out from a boxer's head, so you get a first-person view of what he might have seen when the punch arrived!" In a recent Sports Loft Podcast, Yanni Andreopoulos and Charlie Greenwood chatted with Kamal Mistry , CEO of Arcturus, about how volumetric video can enhance the sports broadcast experience with “impossible angles” for replays. The tech can also provide much-needed content for AR/VR headsets and be used in innovative sponsorship tie-ins. The podcast includes: 😎 How the market for immersive rights is shaping up 🏀 Which sports will get the volumetric treatment first 🎥 What’s required to capture volumetric video 🤔 The challenges of complexity and compression Listen here: https://pod.fo/e/252e7f

Will Volumetric Video change the way we watch sports? Yanni Andreopoulos and Charlie Greenwood are joined on the Sports Loft podcast by Kamal Mistry, CEO of Arcturus, a company specialising in volumetric video – a technique that allows for the capture and display of three-dimensional spaces and objects. Kamal shares his views on how volumetric can enhance the broadcast experience with “impossible angles” for replays as well as providing content for the VR market. They also cover: How the market for immersive rights is shaping up Which sports will get the volumetric treatment first What’s required to capture volumetric video Listen to the podcast on Apple here: https://lnkd.in/e9Rvm7ei or on Spotify here: https://lnkd.in/eeA77Gbv

There was a time when fan data was seen as messy and hard to manage. Which led teams and leagues to outsource their database strategies to third parties. However, all that's changing, and today fan data is increasingly viewed as an asset to maximise rather than a headache that needs to be dealt with. Now, teams and leagues are taking ownership of their data. Central to this approach is having the right tools to organise and interrogate fan data – and action the resulting insights. One such technology is sports-focused analytics platform StellarAlgo, whose CEO and founder, Vincent Ircandia joined us on the podcast to talk about how they work with the likes of the National Basketball Association (NBA), New York Yankees and LA Galaxy. Listen here: https://pod.fo/e/24d8a6

Between stages of the Tour de France and knock-out rounds in the Euros, we've given the newsletter a bit of a refresh. Let us know what you think! Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eeR-Nf6u? Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/gy6ruFe And make sure to listen to our latest podcast, in which Vincent Ircandia, CEO and founder of analytics platform StellarAlgo, is the latest industry-leading thinker to join Yanni Andreopoulos and Charlie Greenwood in the Sports Loft studio. Plus: – Apple’s different approach to AI – Is Uber an ad business now? – Our recommended reads – A favourite from our socials, by Wimbledon

"OneCourt is a haptic display that gives blind and low vision fans the opportunity to experience live sports at their fingertips." "There are over 250 million people worldwide with a visual disability and they deserve access to live sports as we all do." In our penultimate session at the Sports Loft Summit, Antyush Bollini, COO of OneCourt, introduced the company’s haptic tabletop device, which makes sport more inclusive for blind and partially sighted fans. Often, these audiences have to rely on audio sources not tailored to their needs. But OneCourt provides a tactile way to follow the likes of basketball, baseball, tennis and football. Learn more about OneCourt by checking out the video archive we've uploaded on the Sports Loft website: https://lnkd.in/e-pMtwXY We also featured talks from Monterosa, Storyteller, Spalk, StellarAlgo, Satisfi Labs, Twelve Labs, Opus Clip, AudioShake, Ateme, Arcturus and Tagboard 🔥