The NCAA America East Conference has adopted technology built by Reely to enable league-wide automated video highlights.
The Division 1 conference, which includes colleges in the northeast such as the University of New Hampshire, University of Albany, UMass Lowell and University of Vermont, has inked a partnership with automated highlights company Reely.
Under the terms of the deal, Reely becomes the official highlight solutions partner of the conference, giving the conference and its member institutions full use of the platform to create and distribute content from live or archived broadcasts during the 2018/19 academic year. The America East deal marks Reely’s first-ever partnership with a collegiate conference, and the first conference-wide transition to automated highlights.
“Reely’s platform will allow the conference and our schools to provide fans more content and do so faster than humanly possible,” said Sean Tainsh, America East’s associate commissioner for content strategy, in a press release.
Reely uses a proprietary computer vision and artificial intelligence technology to automatically detect and create content at what the company claims is “10-times the speed of real time.” Highlights are sorted in Reely’s portal to be pushed out across social media channels or packaged for highlight reels.
In the announcement, Reely Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Ian Stephens said the partnership with America East will help to “speed adoption throughout the sports landscape.”
Like many larger collegiate conferences, America East produces hundreds of events each school year through its own media brand, AmericaEast.TV, and The AE on ESPN. AmericaEast.TV has been the home of more than 3,000 live events since launching in 2013. The AE on ESPN launched in November 2016 as the home for America East basketball and will feature more than 3,000 games over the next decade.
SportTechie Takeaway
Automated highlights are becoming an increasingly attractive technology for major leagues and conferences that are trying to keep pace with live events and the increasing demand for content. Signing an entire collegiate conference for a one-year term allows Reely to show how automated video highlights might help larger organizations better manage content creation and distribution as they work to keep fans engaged throughout the year.
A number of companies are now claiming AI-powered automated video tags and highlights, including IBM, which has provided similar services for tennis and golf events. Reely, a part of Sportradar’s Acceleradar program, has previously partnered with individual teams in major and collegiate leagues, including the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and the NCAA’s Kansas Jayhawks.