- Liverpool FC required staff to sort through huge amounts of footage to create videos for social media.
- The company is currently using AI tools developed by Wasabi Technologies to speed up content production.
- This article is “CXO AI Playbook“Business leaders speak openly about how they're testing and using AI.”
In “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider presents mini-case studies of AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. Each company talks about the problem they're trying to solve with AI, who is making those decisions within their company, and their vision for the future of AI.
Liverpool Football Club is a key member of the English Premier League, the most popular football league in the world. The club has a huge social media following, boasting around 46 million followers on Instagram alone.
Situation Analysis: What problem was Liverpool Football Club trying to solve?
“We create and record a ton of content every day,” Drew Crisp, senior vice president of digital at Liverpool Football Club, told Business Insider. The company has footage of every game the team plays, every interview the players do, and many parts of the club's rich history. Crisp said that's terabytes worth of data.
The sheer volume of footage makes information hard to find, and until now the club's digital team, which creates content for social media, has used older storage formats like hard drives and relied on tagging content with data like player names and “people's memories,” Crisp said.
“Someone somewhere will remember, 'Hold on a second, we shot this content here, let's take a look at that part of the archive,'” Crisp added.
He said the time spent tracking down that content would be better spent actually editing and producing it, so the club turned to AI for help.
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The company partnered with Wasabi Technologies, which develops AI-powered programs for cloud data storage and retrieval, to help its digital team unearth archival clips that might have been overlooked.
Use of AI
The AI-powered system has two uses: First, it uploads all club-related footage, including live match broadcasts and post-match interviews, to the cloud for archiving.
“You can store your entire archive there,” Crisp says, “so it's easily accessible, efficient, low cost and you can access it from anywhere.”
The system also allows editors to pull relevant content from the archive to create content for the team's social media channels. “We use AI labeling for the editing and tagging and a lot of the search functionality,” Crisp says. For example, a video editor working for the club can query the system for footage of all the counter attacks that led to striker Darwin Nunez's goals, and it will pull relevant scenes from the database.
Similarly, the system is designed to detect when the names of corporate sponsors appear in in-stadium advertising, allowing clubs to prioritise clips featuring specific brands.
Did it work, and how did they know?
Crisp said the AI system gave the club's editors more efficient access to content.
The club is not too sure about the quantifiable results of the archiving so far: “I don't think we know yet how efficient this is and how useful it is,” he says. “As we ramp up the archiving further over the next six months, we'll see the results.”
What's next?
Liverpool Football Club is testing further features of the Wasabi system: it wants to link a database containing the club's video clips to Wasabi to see whether it can improve the tagging of existing data.
Crisp also wants to test wider access to the system. “One of the things we want to do in the future is put this in the hands of the fans,” he said. “We can stitch together content and let them choose whether they want to see Ian Rush score a goal or Darwin score a goal.”
“It would be great to give fans the power to choose what they want to see,” he added.
