International Paralympic Committee to unleash potential of digital content through egoli Media's AI technology

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has today appointed egoli Media, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled technology and media company, to transform its content management, increase accessibility and create new monetisation and storytelling opportunities.

The partnership, which has been secured until 31 December 2024, will see egoli Media use its proprietary AI software to digitise and automatically log, tag and categorise all IPC-owned content, which will enable better and faster access to footage from previous and future Paralympic Games, as well as other major Para sport events.

egoli’s AI technology will be able to analyse and tag Paralympic content frame by frame to create an organised, data-rich library and personalised search experience, catalogued to identify Para athletes, places, actions and brands. It is also sophisticated enough to analyse Paralympic sport specific features, such as searching athletes according to the classification system.

For the first time, over 8,000 hours of taped footage from the 1992 Paralympic Games onwards will be digitised and catalogued, alongside World Para Sports championships, associated photography and reports. Up to 1,500 hours of live broadcast World Feeds and non-televised footage from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games will be annotated and categorised via egoli’s Annotation engine, which will scan every second of content to automatically log and tag it.

This innovation means users of the archive can discover the exact moments in Paralympic history that matter to them. Footage will be made available for licensing and download by stakeholders and interested parties via a management library, alongside crowd celebrations, medal ceremonies, in-stadium coverage, outside competition footage and more.

By unlocking this data, the IPC will be able to deliver unparalleled value to its partners and provide new services to their members. It will ensure fast and accurate download and distribution to meet the editing and storytelling requirements of IPC stakeholders, such as rights-holders and commercial partners, as well as those who want to access IPC footage, like media, filmmakers, content creators and producers. Significantly, it opens up the possibility of new revenue streams by increasing accessibility and enabling the sustained use of valuable, underutilised hours of content.

Commenting on the new partnership, Alexis Schäfer, Commercial, Partnerships & Broadcasting Director of the International Paralympic Committee, said:

"egoli’s AI technology is at the forefront of sports content innovation and we have been impressed by the accuracy and depth their algorithms can capture. Manually logging video content is time consuming and labour intensive, as every single log is someone pointing at one moment or element in time in that video and putting that information into a log sheet. However, now we have AI technology that can do that job and more, as it unlocks thousands of data points in each event: it’s able to recognise all the brands on screen, it has face recognition to track athletes in a race or match and follow them for the duration of it, and can even tell us if the background stands are empty or full of people cheering.

"egoli Media is going to make content creation so much easier for the IPC and its stakeholders. For example, you would be able to search ‘Johnnie Peacock, 100m, 2016 and any partner’s name’ to see whether it is available on the system and immediately access it – it means a job that might have taken hours can now be minutes. The egoli platform will offer us a lot of new opportunities, from the ability to commercialise content to making it easier to create storyboards that we or our partners can post on our digital channels. For us this new partnership is an important milestone in our digital innovation journey."

Meaning ‘place of gold’, egoli Media provides a new, unique offering to power the $6.2 billion secondary content market in sport and is led by a team of highly respected and experienced sports professionals, including Caroline Rowland, Sophie Goldschmidt and Tom Fox. egoli’s AI can be trained and applied across sports and entertainment to produce millions of clips that are searchable in granular detail, providing new monetisation, storytelling and fan engagement opportunities.

Founder and CEO of egoli Media, Caroline Rowland, said:

"With so much video content being created every day, the challenge of organising it and realising its value has become overwhelming for content creators and rights holders. The only way to access its value, is to make content searchable at a granular level. Our proprietary and ground-breaking AI means that rights holders can now dig deep into their archives as well as the new content they create, to find moments of extraordinary value. Simply put, this means accessing millions of dollars in secondary licensing revenues at a time when the traditional model is coming under huge pressure.

"We’re delighted to be partnering with the International Paralympic Committee to support them in telling more incredible stories to more people around the world. I’m so proud that our ground-breaking technology is bringing three decades of Paralympic content to an accessible content marketplace that supports both the storytelling and commercial objectives of the Paralympic Movement."

For an initial period of four years, the first-of-its-kind partnership will see egoli Media provide:

Live annotation services at the Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022 and Paris 2024 Paralympic Games

People recognition for Paralympic athletes from 1992 to 2024

Training of action, object and TV graphic recognition across all 28 sports

Definition of tags for all 28 egoli Paralympic models

Inventory of all brands and logos featured from 1992 to 2024

Integration into the egoli Insight tool providing full access to video and statistics through a single user interface

The digitisation of tapes and upload of digital content to secure and structured cloud storage

The creation of a ground-breaking Media Asset Management (MAM) system

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