Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OZeye (Developing Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence for best-quality and cost-effective live sports production and distribution)

Teaser

OZ steps in boldly into the world of sports production and broadcasting whose limited resources and prohibitive costs are available only to the best financed, most popular and wealthiest football leagues and clubs. As a result, more than 98% of footballing world will never...

Summary

OZ steps in boldly into the world of sports production and broadcasting whose limited resources and prohibitive costs are available only to the best financed, most popular and wealthiest football leagues and clubs. As a result, more than 98% of footballing world will never reach those supporters who can’t attend the football games. Majority of fans’ favourite teams are the ones in their own suburbs, towns and neighbourhoods. However, short of a personal attendance they have no chance of ever seeing their beloved teams at play. In the prevailing sports production and broadcasting environment there is no way that the less well-known clubs can get any closer to their own supporters whether locally or those living further away

OZeye studio cuts 97% of production and broadcasting cost of making live football games available to football leagues that need exposure, wider support and involvement of the segment of society that loves and follows football. Using the OZ platform’s unique revenue share model helps footbal clubs with opportunities to advance their players in exchange for transfer fees and earn larger revenues to provide better facilities and training opportunities for their members. Fans far outnumber the people who attend live football games in person. OZ’s advanced broadcasting platform have made it possible for football games to be streamed to an increasing variety of devices, anywhere and anytime. OZ creates a stadium like environment where fans can experience similar level of camaraderie that spectators do during live matches in a stadium. Leagues recognize that they produce the content for their fans and fans long to get involved in their teams sporting lives and wellbeing. The OZ platform brings both sides together.

To complete this business vision, OZ Sports needs to advance its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities to create the value-adding offer for the leagues and clubs, and the immersive online communities for the football fans. The project will also leverage its desire to serve more customers by scaling its infrastructure and standardising its published content.

Work performed

Technical Feasibility assessed that OZeye production and broadcasting suite requires further development around its AI and AR and CV components. The reasons for this technical work are two-fold. Firstly, OZeye needs to become a total self-driven replacement for traditional ground filming crews. It will do so by intelligent study and following of the game, as if it were a human camera operator. The AI will learn to faultlessly track the ball and the players, which will be a step up from the existing crowd-tracking technology. The AR component is designed to boost the immersive experience for fans and create an atmosphere of a live stadium, where different functional roles will be available to members of such online communities that share their passion around their favorite teams. Additionally, the AR components will provide an avenue for sponsors to get involved in this virtual world as their advertising is intelligently inserted into live gaming streaming and curated individually to every single concurrent user. Our platform needs to grow in robust support to host hundreds of thousands of concurrent streaming sessions. These technical accomplishments will advance our technology from the current TRL7 to a commercially-viable level of TRL9. We translated the project\'s functional requirements into technical work, where the goal is to have OZeye arrive at a point of its technical level to mitigate the project’s potential technical risks.

Commercial Feasibility defined our core customer groups as footballing organizations, fans and sponsors. Each of these will directly benefit from the technical advancement we plan to complete above. Existing business model foresees supply of our Production System at our cost, which will be immediately recoupled from the paid involvement of our fans and sponsors. Once we have recovered the initial investment, we’ll enter into an automatic 50:50 revenue sharing model with our partner leagues and clubs. Our initial markets include Germany, France, UK, Italy and Spain. Having a very strong partner in the footballing world we will aim to expand right across Europe within 3 years of commercializing this project. The dynamic nature of our technology is very fluid and does away with the need to aggressively apply for patents. The operating paradigm is one of continuous innovation and not defensive protection. With new technological breakthroughs being common in the environment of the Open Source, we will will not pursue robust patenting strategies. However, our current FTO/IPR analysis has not demonstrated any patents that would display a level of similarity to close to our innovation.

We carried out a Financial Feasibility to test our business model and its potential to generate revenues that would justify our investment of time and capital, including potential funds potentially obtained under EC’s H2020 SME Instrument. While our study took account of the most conservative revenue streams, we know that we will pursue other realistic avenues of additional income.

Final results

Major sports production and broadcasting networks due to prevailing technology are priced outside of majority of football leagues’ and clubs’ budgets. This is the reason why these lower level leagues will never be broadcast across online and digital channels. They are too small to attract the attention of sponsors and the broadcasters who do not have suitable business models to make such a collaboration a financial success for all partners.
OZ and its technology are disrupting this production and broadcasting paradigm because it relies on AI to produce the game at a significant reduction in cost, and it depends on the latest AR developments to create a sport viewing experience within a context of an online community that draws fans. The technology does not attract just the viewers’ eyeballs but provides and engrossing experience and immersive community of fans that share their football passion around their favourite teams.
OZ cleverly blends the input of advanced technologies to remove the need for intense game production and provides varied opportunities for football fan specialists to contribute unique content that creates human interest in the game and unites fans in a private online stadium environment. The embedded AI/AR processes directly connect clubs and players with their fans and sponsors, all of whom have an opportunity for financial gain

Website & more info

More info: https://www.oz.com/.