Infront Sports & Media And Harris Strike Italian Football Deal

Infront Sports & Media's Italian subsidiary Infront Italy, is using advanced digital asset management (DAM) technology from Harris Broadcast Communications to provide Italian football fans with access to high definition (HD) highlights from Italian football league matches. Fans can view the highlights on their mobile phones, PDAs and laptops within minutes of the live event.
Infront Italy is contracted by the Italian football leagues (Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie A and Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie B) to provide domestic media outlets with highlights for news purposes in compliance with the Italian law. The broadcasters can select interesting action during a live match streaming and will receive that content rapidly from the system for their own personalized editing.
Also, thanks to Harris technology, Infront is providing Italian mobile network operators with live football content for their subscribers. Through a media gateway connected to the system, the editors are able to create goal clips directly on the timeline of the NLE (non-linear editor) during the live event. The clips are sent to the mobile telecom operators to be distributed immediately to end users.
Finally, to exploit archive rights both inside and outside of Italy, Infront has created and manages an indexed HD digital archive of Italian league football, which is remotely accessible by broadcasters, production companies, football club TV channels and event sponsors amongst others.
Working with local distributor Prevideo, Harris has designed, installed and commissioned a file-based media workflow that incorporates Harris’ Invenio® digital asset management software solution integrated alongside Harris NEXIO AMP™ servers to enable the recording of live football matches. The solution also supports the editing of goal and highlights action so that media files can be transcoded to various different formats for users to view on a diversity of mobile devices.
"We went to Harris with a business requirement — create an overall archive of Italian football league matches which could serve Infront’s multifaceted needs in terms of live, near live and delayed audio-visual material supplies," commented Claudio Cavallotti, Director, Production and Technical Facilities at Infront Italy. "The Harris workflow made this project possible. Invenio DAM is managing the content from our Infront digital archive, based on a large Isilon cluster. It is an elegant and powerful media management tool that supports the exploitation of our valuable archive."
Infront Sports & Media handles the media and marketing rights for many large, international sports events and federations, and also provides sports services such as advertising solutions and sponsorship implementation. It manages the host broadcast production for a range of summer and winter sports worldwide. The Harris Invenio and NEXIO AMP architecture is so successful that the company has started to extend its reach beyond Italian league football to include sports such as skiing and superbike.
The distribution of media content, in particular to mobile devices, is a valuable pillar in the commercialisation of sports events. Harris believes that this application is an early example of a growing application set in the new media age.
"Working closely with Infront Italy we have created a powerful new digital media asset workflow that links sports stadiums with a network of millions of fixed and mobile devices providing rich content that service providers value highly," comments Mathias Eckert, vice president, sales and services, Europe & Africa. "Invenio and NEXIO AMP are technologies that are firmly rooted in the broadcast domain but here we are demonstrating their power and versatility to evolve into new anycast business models."
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