Introduction

As specialist arm of IMG Media, the world’s largest independent producer and distributor of sports programming, IMG Replay is the largest dedicated sports archive in the world. The company has enjoyed a long history of managing, marketing and distributing the archives of prestigious events, federations and governing bodies, ranging from Wimbledon to UFC to Miss Universe.

 To accommodate the sheer scale and variety of its collections, IMG Replay previously stored video content on behalf of their clients on their premises. However, this presented significant challenges when it came to customers wanting to search through and preview content; in many cases this was simply impossible to achieve in practise. The difficulty in marketing their assets meant that the business potential of the world’s most exciting sports content was not fully realised.

IMG Replay needed a new solution that could manage all of their media more efficiently and through a cloud- accessible platform.

The opportunity

With such a wide range of clients and events in IMG Replay’s collection, an effective search tool was a top priority for any new platform. Importantly, the ability for clients to remotely access content, 24/7 was a top priority, so that the limitation of previewing content on the premises was no longer a business bottleneck.

In addition to increasing the availability of content, IMG Replay wanted to boost productivity, by reducing the amount of time spent managing assets. Current time-consuming tasks included importing shotlist data, plus clipping and formatting content for different social platforms or websites. By streamlining these processes, staff hours could instead be spent on better servicing existing clients’ needs and developing new business.

Finally, as the world’s largest archive of sports content, IMG Replay also wanted to ensure that clients’ brands were represented correctly, and that it was clear IMG was the key rights holder in each case.

The solution

The Imagen platform allows all of the locally-hosted assets to be stored in a single cloud-based repository. Unlike with local hosting, this allows both IMG Replay staff and external clients to access the assets whenever they need to and without compromising performance.

With all the assets located in a single platform, clients can now quickly search across the entire collection of sports content managed by IMG Replay. Once the relevant asset is found, clips can easily be created, formatted and licensed for whatever film or TV productions, social or web platforms are needed.

“The search feature is so powerful it allows us to find what we need in seconds,” said Tom Barnes, Vice President Global of IMG Replay. “And thanks to Imagen’s powerful time-based metadata logging, we can even find specific moments within videos and clip them for use. This not only saves time, but allows us to make better use of our collections too.”

In additional to supporting detailed metadata the Imagen platform can also import existing shotlist data from third parties. Or where it doesn’t exist already, generate it with the powerful one-click Media Logging Tool which can be used to easily index long-form video. Once applied, users are able to search for specific moments within long-form content – such as a goal within a football match.

The benefits were immediately obvious, not just internally, but for IMG Replay’s clients too. In particular, they appreciate that their valuable content is showcased and available for licensing through an attractive, fully-branded website, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

From a business perspective, IMG Replay has seen revenues increase since the implementation of the platform, thanks to its enhanced capabilities and greater staff productivity. And, unlike local storage solutions, the Imagen platform is built for scale, able to accommodate any quantity of media in the future, supporting IMG Replay’s future business growth.

Key features

• Regular news updates to promote new content
• Dedicated partner pages
• Curated collections of editorial content
• Full tournament and player profiles 
• Automated ingest from IMG corporate MAM 
• Email of Single Sign On authentication 
• Case studies of how IMG content has been used 
• Clip and download proxies for fast comping 
• Multi-language news and features pages 

“Our aim has always been to create the world’s best sports archive and this is a major step in achieving our goal.”

Richard Wise, Senior Vice President, IMG