“When sport teams tell you what tech they use, people stand up and take notice”: Wasabi tells us how it is helping Liverpool FC score big on content for fans everywhere
As sports teams look to deliver a fast, rich experience to fans around the world, having access to their content is a vital need. But with matches, training sessions and even commercial appearances running non-stop, 24 hours a day, it can be difficult to get the right content at the right time.
One of the most iconic names in world football, Liverpool FC worked with Wasabi to transform their cloud storage capabilities, giving them the ability to create content like never before, and the pair invited TechRadar Pro to the club’s AXA Training Center to find out more.
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The relationship began during the pandemic, when the club’s media production had to move from an on-premises setup to something more flexible by moving operations to the cloud.
“It was extremely important for us, going forward, to be able to do more in terms of connecting with our audiences and storytelling,” says Andy Fletcher, vice president of technology and digital products at Liverpool FC.
The club has its own television channel, LFCTV, which broadcasts 24/7 to millions of homes in over 90 countries, and a huge social media presence which draws on the latest video and image content.
It uses Wasabi AiR to not only transfer and download this content quickly and smoothly, transforming what previously took days into just seconds, but also to automatically mark what the content actually shows.
This can be as simple as spotting which players are involved in a certain clip, who scores the goal or provides the assist, but can also focus on areas such as the specific competition a match is being played in and the season it took place.
From a commercial perspective, Wasabi AiR can also mark the display of a specific sponsor’s logo or advertising, giving these partners much more insight into the effectiveness of their placement.
“It has fundamentally changed the way we do business in this area,” notes Fletcher, saying the technology has saved “well over 5,000 hours” within the team over the course of a year.
The content isn’t just from the latest games: “The club has huge data archives, terabytes of data going back decades, that we can draw on to enrich these stories,” notes Fletcher.
“We have a fantastic relationship with Liverpool FC,” says David Boland, vice president of marketing innovation and market intelligence at Wasabi, “but I spend a lot of time talking to other organizations and they’re all heading in the same direction, where they want to add value to their fan base and to fans with some traction – that could be apps, or any type of in-stadium, on-site activities, and that has a lot to do with uncovering hidden gems of content available to them.”
“There’s a lot of value in getting those stock images, moving them to the cloud, and making them easily accessible to users – and a lot of that starts with a cloud storage solution.”
Boland explains that Wasabi’s vision was to enable customers to access their data from the cloud, wherever and whenever they are, with no egress fees, no data retrieval fees or API fees.
“We see that many organizations want to add value to the content they have stored, and with the advent of new AI technologies, like the ability to ask questions and get answers using agents, we think people are going to do a lot more in the future… (and) there’s no tape involved, so it takes milliseconds to access that data.
Fletcher notes that the club operates a combination of cloud and on-premises storage: “We’re moving primarily towards cloud storage, but as a business there are some things we have to do on-premises just because that’s the nature of the business around the stadium. »
“Wasabi AiR has allowed us to do this in a very different and much faster way, and by doing this and removing a lot of manual processes in terms of tagging and automation, allows us to spend more time on storytelling and ultimately connecting with the audience which adds value to us as a club,” he added.
“Of course, all of this future-proofs us for the transformation that’s coming and fosters a consistent way of working, an infrastructure that we can scale – and it’s much more resilient than before, and it really prepares us for the next five or 10 years in terms of how we look at things.”
“When Wasabi partnered with LFC, people definitely stood up and took notice,” Boland concludes, “word of mouth is definitely big in the sports market… (and) when sports teams tell you what technology they’re using, people stand up and take notice.”
