Fox Corp.’s Fox Sports is turning to generative artificial-intelligence to help its staffers more rapidly generate content from millions of hours of its archived games footage.
The sports programmer inked an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud to use the internet giant’s generative AI technology. Fox Sports said that by using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Vision system, it can quickly search footage from more than 1.9 million videos and produce new content “in near real-time” for TV, social and marketing content.
“With Google Cloud, we’re able to utilize video search, advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate one of the most manual processes in sports media: tagging and searching video content,” said Brad Zager, president of production/operations and executive producer, Fox Sports. “Compared to previous media management workflows, our team is able to swiftly find relevant content, which is critical in the business of live sports.”
The parties said the announcement expands on their collaboration in building Fox Sports’ Intelligent Asset Service (IAS), which was first announced in 2020. IAS uses Google Cloud’s video search and machine-learning capabilities to help the sports network automate managing media assets. IAS has allowed Fox Sports to extract more value from its content library by reducing its reliance on paper logs and producers manually sifting through video archives. As of 2022, IAS has been implemented across all major Fox Sports broadcasts.
Fox Sports also was an early adopter of Google Workspace, allowing staffers to connect and collaborate with teammates across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive and more. With Duet AI in Google Workspace, the company can create a production schedule for a sports season in “minutes versus the hours it would take to do so manually,” according to the announcement.
“Fox Sports is committed to providing its viewers the best possible experiences across platforms, and that starts with the technology that powers them,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement. “By choosing Google Cloud’s AI technologies, Fox Sports is not only maximizing its content production capabilities, but also delivering transformative viewing experiences that keep its audiences engaged and entertained.”
