Imagen is a legacy tool that has been around for years, and like many legacy tools, they have an incredibly complete tool when it comes to media asset management and continue to feel like a main stage character. However, sports is a very specific industry and sometimes it is not about the complexity of the potential solution, but the simplicity of the right workflow. Time to exit stage right.
In terms of both storage and ingest, Imagen are able to take in petabytes of content, from video live streams to storing social media posts and store in cloud solutions like Amazon S3s and Azure. Imagen’s security is top notch and they offer the usual DRM aspects that would be useful to sports organisations, such as watermarking, media link expiry and sunrise and sunset dates. Imagen’s search, although a bit clunky, is effective as long as your assets are already set with the right metadata and searchable terms. Imagen also have a great Media Logger, that allows you to tag your video content manually, with the previously used keywords showing up and providing a very useful workflow (we call ours the Control Room).
In terms of artificial intelligence for video, it feels like Imagen applied the technology to media asset management by looking at what was possible, rather than thinking what was useful. That being said, Imagen’s AI is incredibly good at closed captioning, speech-to-text, text detection, and translation - but their automatic tagging will clog your videos and tag moments that are not useful to any sports organisation in a fast-paced digital environment. Meanwhile, Imagen’s AI for photo lacks the cutting edge that you need with sports, and will return false positives that you would not want distributed to your athletes, partners or stakeholders.
And that brings us to Imagen’s distribution. They’ve created very useful workflows for FTP and OTT with their rules engine that means you can build custom workflows, and offer Accelerated File Delivery which is incredibly good for sports organisations needing to transfer huge broadcast quality files. However, Imagen offers no way to get this content to your athletes and partners. You can integrate with other tools - but when you’re paying for enterprise all-in-one tool, you’d expect to get every feature you wanted. Or at least that they built the workflow for you if you asked. Well. You can continue dreaming.
That’s where ScorePlay enters the scene. ScorePlay is a fresh solution for fresh problems. It provides features sport organisations truly need to maximise their digital workflows all along a media asset's value chain. We know from experience (we’ve been purpose built by sports organisations) that sports clubs have traditionally struggled to store, manage, distribute, and otherwise use their content in a scalable way that amplifies their brand. Our platform has an easy-to-use interface that makes managing assets incredibly simple. With ScorePlay, all of the weight that was traditionally on digital team members’ shoulders to organise the storage of assets has now been lifted: time, resources etc.
ScorePlay's AI auto-tags all your assets and archives, and has a powerful and fast search engine for all tags (player, event, partner, date, photographer etc). FTP connectors allow for live photos to be fed directly into the platform, which can then be validated by an admin. Live broadcast integration via RTMP or SRT means immediate use of video for short-form content with live clipping. Meanwhile, calendar integration means all your Collections (games, matches, tournaments etc.) are linked directly to the platform and ready to be populated with assets. Automated distribution channels through our apps allow you to share content directly with your athletes and partners, to leverage your ambassadors' influence and improve your sponsorship package.
Organisations can also now sign up to have fan engagement tools through a unique link-in-bio, analytics on their media’s performance, permissions management and player generated content, all within the same tool. We’ve become an all-in-one media toolkit, and even better yet, the ScorePlay team is constantly updating the solution to make sure we remain best-in-class for sports organisations. We cover every type of media asset, all the way from capture to consumption.
Imagen offer a great solution for large media companies that want a structured back-end that will keep their content safe and accessible in a timely manner. But they’re not made for the sports industry. It’s not that they can’t be used, it’s just that why would you use Imagen but when you have sports specific tools available like ScorePlay. There’s a reason why our clients are switching from Imagen. Reach out if you want to find out why for yourself.
Please note feature information is correct as of June 2023. ScorePlay has made every attempt to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information provided on this website. However, the information is provided “as is” without a warranty of any kind. ScorePlay does not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained within this article.
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