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ChyronHego today announced that the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL), one of the world’s largest sports organizations, has signed a new four-year contract with ChyronHego to use the company’s award-winning TRACAB™ image-based tracking system for Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 matches.
Installed in all 35 DFL arenas, TRACAB will continue to collect real-time ball and player-tracking data and enable powerful team and player insight for the 36 DFL football clubs over the next four years, representing a total of almost 2,500 matches.
As part of this announcement, ChyronHego will be working in close partnership with the new subsidiary of the DFL, Sportec Solutions GmbH, which provides data gathering, storage, and distribution for Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2. Sportec Solutions is a new innovation hub for sports technology in German football, driving converging technologies such as a video-assisted replay center, wearables, and new goal-line technology. With this collaboration, ChyronHego and Sportec Solutions will work together to develop a next-generation optical player-tracking system based on the core capabilities of TRACAB. The new optical tracking solution will initially be deployed for DFL clubs, but will also eventually be marketed to other sports organizations globally.
“We’re honored to continue our strong partnership with DFL, one of the world’s premier sports organizations. Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 rank among the highest-revenue-generating football leagues in the world, and consistently boast the highest average stadium attendance figures. Therefore, the DFL’s decision to keep TRACAB speaks volumes about the system’s power and advanced capabilities for detailed sports tracking and analysis,” said Johan Apel, president and CEO, ChyronHego. “At the same time, we’re excited to be working with Sportec Solutions to advance sports-tracking technology to the next generation. With TRACAB as the foundation, we’re taking a powerful step forward toward expanding our global leadership in sports-tracking solutions.”
Dr. Hendrik Weber, managing director at Sportec Solutions, added, “We look forward to continuing to leverage TRACAB’s real-time data-collection capabilities to further empower our teams and create a more engaging experience for our broadcast partners’ viewers. Bundesliga has been at the cutting edge of innovation and sports technology for years and will continue to invest in this area.”
At every Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 match, TRACAB uses advanced image-processing technology to determine the position of all moving objects in the field of play — including players, referees, assistant referees, and the ball. The result is a live data feed that contains the X, Y, and Z positional coordinates for each identified object. The data can then be streamed in an open format to a multitude of visualization platforms, such as broadcast graphics systems and online or mobile platforms, and it can also be used to prepare comprehensive sets of performance statistics for sports analysts.
“In order to uncover even more of the hidden genetics within the game of football, we will work together with our partners at ChyronHego and Sportec Solutions to create the next generation of the TRACAB ecosystem,” Weber continued. “The richness, quality, and latency of the data that will be available to us over the coming years opens up an unprecedented level of insight and analysis of the game by teams, the media, and fans.”