From camera to consumer in under 60 seconds – the AI tools empowering NFL and MLB content teams

0:09Nick Meacham:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone, the community lead joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Now, Nick, we do have another guest with us today, so I won't spend too much time on it, but I'm conscious of the fact we are recording this podcast the day after the Club World Cup final. We might not get to talk about it again because I'm going on holiday next week. just really quickly nick did you get to watch it any top line thoughts because i got a couple

0:32Chris Stone:okay well i did tune in but i tuned in at basically a two it was already two nil by that time so in the immediately i'm like oh okay well i'll stick it out for a bit then i turned away for a bit because i had it on my phone because i didn't have any zone access on any of my smart devices in the house and then there was another goal and i missed that so it was a three nil down I'd missed all the action, so I basically gave up pretty quickly after that and started keeping another eye on the lionesses in the Euros happening in Switzerland after Wimbledon earlier. So lots to consume over a few hours, but sadly, I think Kat should want to make one obviously for business purposes as well as leisure to see everything was going okay.

1:15Chris Stone:I didn't get to see the aftermath or pre-game with various leaders popping up for the match. But yeah, did you get a chance to see it yourself?

1:26Nick Meacham:So I did. And those are some of my complaints, Nick. I mean, you know, the broadcast was fine. The coverage was fine. I had no issues getting to zone up on my smart TV, things like that. And I'm not even going to blame FIFA because UEFA have tried doing the same thing with like Champions League finals. I know people want to make it into like a Super Bowl, but like the pregame, like music shows, the halftime shows, like they just don't feel right. Like they were, I thought they were pretty rough. To be honest, I wasn't a huge fan of some of that. And I'll just admit, it's kind of weird seeing a PIF Saudi Arabia commercial for an American broadcast just because of our history in the region.

2:03Nick Meacham:But yeah, I think some of the shows, I'm not sure they're cut for it, Nick.

2:08Chris Stone:I think it's still a work in progress to add the halftime and pregame action to the likes of the NFL and the NBA have. So football and soccer experts are still working at that. and we still feel as far away from it as we were about 20 years ago. Despite all the US execs I've met over the years that have told me they're the ones to solve the problem. We're still in waiting. But look, 12 months now to the World Cup in the US. They'll sort it out by then, I'm sure.

2:37Nick Meacham:Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm really optimistic. But nonetheless, we will move things along. I will bring in our guest who is Andrew Fingerman, who's the CEO of PhotoShelter. Now, Andrew, before I start peppering you with questions, do you have any thoughts on what Nick and I have said? Did you get a chance to watch the club world cup final given it's, you know, was in New York where you're based at? I did. I did actually. It's practically in my backyard at, at the, uh, I might, I might allow to say it, given that this isn't an official broadcast. It was the MetLife stadium. Yeah.

3:05Chris Stone:We don't have any naming rights restrictions in place for the governing bodies of the world. Don't worry. It'll be interesting to see how that all gets handled when, when they're playing, you know, across the U S various stadiums, but the, um, you know, It was as much a barometer of how the U.S. fans will react to how the New Jersey, New York area and traffic will react. Sprinkle in the fact that a president was coming to join the fund as well. Needless to say, I was able to get around and I was pleased about that, but did nestle in to see the bulk of the game. It was a big sports day and a big sports week, too, between Wimbledon and the Club World Cup.

3:45And now we're heading into the all-star break for Major League Baseball as well. So it's an exciting time. It's not that kind of mid-summer lull that some businesses get.

3:55Chris Stone:Well, about 21 years ago now, I actually went to New Jersey to stay with a family friend. And we got tickets to the NFL to watch the Jets play the Texans. I remember it well. And I don't remember exactly what happened because it was a long time ago. But we ended up getting to the Midlands at the time. and after the game everything was gone we didn't actually know how to get home because we didn't have google we didn't have those things there we're just left in this middle this massive vacant car park go uh what do we do here i don't remember exactly what happened but it took us hours to get home but so we learned the hard way the traffic getting out of those games is not pleasant you just reminded me of a moment growing up when it was the dead of winter after a giants game and my dad lost the car and you don't have your like alarm remote you know start where you could hear things far away so we we wandered around for hours until everybody was out of the parking lab and finally found the car got home oh gosh that sounds beyond a nightmare that sounds beyond a nightmare for me uh and particularly that's the thing because in the states um in a lot of particular states driving to the game is so normal obviously because of um tailgating and stuff as well but uh that is not as big a thing in uh other sports here like you can go to a game in the Premier League and there's just no parking anywhere.

5:09Chris Stone:You can't get to the ground if you're driving basically once you park further afield. So definitely a different experience, that's for sure.

5:16Nick Meacham:Now, before we jump into all the juicy things we're going to talk about today, one of the things I just wanted to call out first, Andrew, is I mentioned you're the CEO of Photo Shelter. You've been there for 17 years. That is a very good run, I feel like, in any walk of life. I guess it would help aid to give people a little bit of a background on Photo Shelter, but also just, you know, your experience, how much you've seen, whether it's, you know, you guys don't just work exclusively in sports. Like you probably give us a little bit of history lessons sort of on, you know, what you've noticed over that time.

5:44Sure. Thanks for asking that, Chris. It has been a career for me, even though I did a few things beforehand as well. I was a sort of started as a marketer, joined PhotoShelter as head of marketing way back in 2000, oh, 2008, if we're counting the 17 years. And at the time, we were a fledgling company with a really, really bright idea around how to store and archive content online for the working professional photographer. Even early in the company's history, we were very popular with sports photographers, photojournalists. A lot of the folks that were traveling and needed to get content from point A to point B in a hurry, our founders had figured out you can string together servers all across the globe, upload that content, store it efficiently, access it wherever you are, and then deliver it to clients.

6:39And so this was 2005 before anybody was using the word cloud and release anybody, you know, like now my mom and my grandma and my kids know it, and they know exactly what it is the companies that power it and whatnot. But so at the time we were, we were actually educating content producers about the value of putting your content online, making it accessible, making it not just to you, but to your, your clients, your customers. Let's say you're on a shoot in, in London and somebody wants the image that you shot at the world series two years ago. Suddenly, thanks to what the founding team here at PhotoShelter built in 2005, we could do that.

7:20So early on, we were archiving that content. We were looking at the metadata. We were providing search based on metadata. But this was to the individual working pro, not the large brand. Over time, we saw more and more brands kind of stumbling over themselves to produce more content. And kind of going back to, let's call it 2012, the first inkling we got of all this content is just piling up on people's computers and outside agency providers and marketers throughout your organization. and when you needed it in the moment, let's say the rise of social media, of course, everybody identified the fact that content helps people connect.

8:14And the more visual content you can provide, the better reactions and engagement you would get. So suddenly it was like, where's all that content that we made? How can we use it? How can we deploy it faster? So we started leaning into that and we built more tools for the brands. And now we have this thriving community of thousands and thousands of independent creators, as well as a few thousand world-class brands that we work with, not just in the sports world. We work with folks like Delta Airlines and Kenneth Cole and travel brands and consumer brands and B2B folks that you wouldn't even believe need content to get their job done.

8:53So the number one kind of insight is that it's almost across industries, the need to kind of take content from the moment it is produced, do all this messy stuff that happens after, get it in one place, edit it, collaborate over it, choose what needs to go into what campaign, and then get it into the hands of the people that need it to do their jobs. That became a high value function that we could serve. And that's what we do for the the organizations that we work with. What we identified in the sports world was that most often that needs to happen within seconds of the action unfolding. And so we built some very unique custom workflows to both identify what's happening in the content.

9:40So who are the players? Who are the brands? What's actually taking place? And then where does that content need to go? So these real-time workflows. Now we have this system that enables from the moment of capture, let's say a home run, a touchdown, a slam dunk, a goal. If that's happening within 60 seconds, it could be moving from the camera on the field, whether it's photo or video, into our system, through our AI, tagged with who the player is, team, etc., and then routed automatically to the people that you have designated who need it to deploy it into the market, whether that be your social team, your web team, all the way down to even your athletes.

10:30And the last part of this is what's happening with it. So we have data that tells you what kind of engagement is that content getting once it's out in the wild and it's left the platform. and that's where things become really interesting and really rich in 2025 to say what kind of return on investment am I getting on my content and what do I need to be doing more to resonate with the fans so that's that's the quick the quick version maybe quick that's that's a pretty

10:58Chris Stone:good wrap-up in 17 years I think Andrew to get that into a couple minutes I'm curious that where you've got to now it sounds like there's a lot of enablement as part of it that taking a step back And the idea of having a dam in this industry is essential. It's every media or every sports company is trying to be a media business in particular in some way, shape or form. And we've seen a number of them who do different things. But it sounds like, I don't know if it is the key thing, but one of the key things is the enablement, the cross-utilization by people, all sorts of different stakeholders in the mix.

11:31Chris Stone:Is that what you think and see as the main driver of value for when you're working with other sports properties? Is that part or is that actually just actually back to the origins of making sure you've really managed your assets really well so you can pull on them, pull that lever whenever you do need them? Because sometimes the thing is obviously we catch a lot of digital stuff is that it gets stuck in the digital, what do you call digital library? And then no one can find it again because it doesn't mean sorted and assessed properly. What's that dynamic like? Yeah, enablement is a very key piece.

12:05I almost look at it as three different universes of stakeholders. You have the contributors. Who is capturing and producing this content? How can you make it as seamless as possible from the moment that that's being captured, the moment the action's unfolding? How can they get it into the system? So first, you have to kind of corral those producers. And if you think about kind of in a game day setting, you might have your staff, photographers, videographers. You might have a few freelancers that have been hired for game day or someone that parks themselves in the tunnel as the players are arriving to see what they're wearing.

12:45So you can quickly get those kind of game day videos and photos out into the audience. But then you've got even the PR team, you might have to reference your tailgate comment from earlier. You may have folks wandering the parking lot, taking pictures of what people are cooking in the parking lot before a game. And so it's identifying where's the content coming from that needs to get into this one central place. Then you have the team that needs to actually work on it, kind of the air traffic control, right? The routing of the content, that might be your photo editors, your video editors, and they're essential.

13:24So getting them kind of up to speed and understanding how to work with the system and making sure that they have all access. And that's key. And for them, what's most important? Making it fast, making it as few clicks as possible, building in alerts so that they know what's arriving and when, and enabling them to get in and get out, collaborate. Sometimes we have some real-time messaging capabilities. If the boss wants to comment, don't use this one, use that one, etc. But then to your point about enablement, the stakeholders. So what we've seen there is years ago, it might have been the social media intern.

14:03And your social media intern can go in, do a search, download something, get it out as leisurely as they care to. and now that universe has expanded. You have scoreboard operators. You have VIP executives in the company who maybe are in the executive suite and just got a photo with the Hall of Fame quarterback that just showed up to take pictures with the sponsors. And they need that. They want to be putting that out to social media during the game. Obviously, you do have a larger social team. You have your web team. You have your media relations team. And this goes on and on all the way to the athletes themselves.

14:45After they shower, they take a look at their phone, they should have a ready-made package of content that they can push out social media to help amplify your brand. And let's not forget the fans. So the fans themselves, pictures with the Stanley Cup or the Super Bowl trophy, the Lamardi trophy. And so the consumption of all this content and the ecosystem of, I'm going to use the term loosely influencers, the influential people who can help amplify your brand and share that experience into the social media audience. It's just expanded so much. So the savvy leagues and the savvy teams are figuring out how to map that ecosystem and take advantage of it in a positive way by getting those people the right content at the right time to share with the right audience.

15:35Chris Stone:Andrew, I just had a follow-up question on that. I'm just wondering, with all this content you are helping manage, whether it be sports or otherwise, you talked a lot about the real-time access or near real-time access that you're sort of looking to enable for stakeholders. Do you have any idea on how much is it all about real-time, near real-time, let's call it, and the old archive side of things? Because the thing is that with a dam, you've got so much in there. Sports, a lot of it is built around the now, the near access, the near action. But obviously, it's enabling the archive component. Do you have any idea whether it's the split of that consumption or use?

16:13Chris Stone:What's that look like? So you'd be surprised it's about 50-50. And so it's not just about real-time game day, get through the system, engage the fans in the moment, but you're producing these assets. These are real assets and they don't depreciate over time they appreciate if you're able to get more return on that investment by using it, finding it and using it in the future. So I like to think of a very active real-time workflow of 60 seconds. It's out. You're counting your likes and your shares and everything like that. And that's amazing. And people being our customers are so excited to just move as quickly as possible, be efficient, get it in front of the audience.

17:07But then you have all kinds of ways you can use this content in the future to generate engagement and generate sponsor activation as well. So think about, I'll confess, this morning as I was having coffee on Instagram, and they always say you're not supposed to do that until whatever time it is of the day. We're all guilty of that, Andrew. Theoretically, I'm working, right? And what do I stop in my scrolling? But there's a famous baseball game, Yankees against the Red Sox, where it went into extra innings. It was a tie game. the playoff contention was on the line and there was a foul ball hit towards the stands.

17:53Derek Jeter goes running at it, lunges towards the ball, catches it, flies directly into the stands. And I'm sitting there watching it like it happened yesterday. And you know what I'm doing? I'm engaging with the brand. And so my point there is it's not just about the game day usage and getting it in front of the audience as quickly as possible. You have player birthdays, You have great moments, clutch moments, all kinds of additional ways to kind of resurface and repurpose this content. I'll tell a quick story if we have a minute. We've got time. There's a photographer who for a very long time worked for the Arizona Cardinals by the name of Gene Lauer.

18:36And Gene took a very famous photo. didn't know it was going to be a famous photo but um i'm sure you remember pat tillman who was the player for the arizona cardinals who uh when the after 9-11 enlisted in the military went to fight in afghanistan and ultimately was was killed in action and uh there was a a very iconic photo of him running helmet in hand hair is flying in the wind he's an enormous enormous iconic character. And this photo became the photo that everyone remembers of Pat Tillman to the point where it's a statue in front of the Arizona Cardinals stadium now. And that was just sitting in Gene's archive, the Arizona Cardinals archive.

19:24And it was surfaced in the moment, but if it wasn't there tagged and searchable, it would have been lost, lost to history.

19:35Nick Meacham:Yeah. And I think that that raises one of the questions I have is just to give people a bit of an idea of like the tangible impact that a technology like this can have. Because I think one of the, one of the things when I speak to my friends who don't work in sports, there's always this assumption that like, all they see is big flashy lights. They assume everybody must have lots of money, lots of resources. And, you know, we got to speak to the head of social media, PSG last week at an event we hosted. And he said, he's got 18 people on the ground for the Club World Cup final. I know for a fact most clubs do not have 18 people on their social media team, let alone 18 people they can just go send to an event.

20:10Nick Meacham:Most of these are typically like one employee that's got to do like six or seven jobs. And to your point, the sheer amount of like photos that are taken in a game, videos taken in a game. Can you talk us through tangibly the amount of time that a technology like this can save? Because to your point, I could imagine just tens of thousands of photos to find that one Pat Tillman photo, which is now done in literally a second. Yeah, so the teams that we work with, they do tell us a few things about the value of the technology. If you think about some of the rigor that needs to go into kind of the movement of this content as it's captured prior to tools like ours, being able to tag the players, tag the brands, and then move that content remotely to where it needs to go and enable the people then to deploy it.

21:01That has been kind of messy, people intensive as recently as a few years ago. And I guarantee there's still a few teams doing it. They're removing the memory card from the camera at the quarter change, handing it to a runner. The runner's running into the media room. They're downloading and figuring out what needs to happen next. So fortunately, we've enabled that to be cut out. We've enabled the kind of human-level tagging to be cut out by and large. I think you can't always trust the machines 100%, especially if, let's say, you have a guy that's the number 17, and they're turning and you see the number seven.

21:47So you have to use technology to look at other factors in the image. That's not always the case that we can see their face. It's not always the case that we can see the name on the back of the jersey. So we have built kind of the sort of very best here and now measures to see if we can still identify that player based on reasoning. And so what the teams have told us is that they have been able to eliminate a number of people. So I'm recalling a Buffalo Bills quote where it's three humans aren't needed at game time to work thanks to our tools. So there's some savings there, which ideally can be redeployed towards creativity instead of just kind of crunk work of running around and sort of manually processing and tagging content.

22:44So enabling the teams there to either employ more content creators or more marketers. So one of the teams that we're working with that has seen incredible success with how they're using our tools across the platform to create efficiencies, using the AI tagging to not just identify the content, but also get it to the right people and then get it out to market. The bills tell us they're able to save$120 ,000 a year just by using the AI tagging and the workflow capabilities. So it's introducing efficiencies that then can be deployed elsewhere towards the team's general marketing success.

23:25Chris Stone:Makes your commercial case a little bit easier, Andrew, when they start sharing those sorts of numbers, when you start talking to renewal time. But that's a huge thing, right? And one of the things we see, Chris, is across the entire ecosystem of sports media is how do we become more effective and more efficient with content, content creation, distribution and the like? because the margins for commercial success around sports media content is still quite tricky to get that balance right. So marginal, some of those costs might be massive for some, might be marginal for others, depending on the scale we're talking, but that can be enough.

23:58Chris Stone:Those percentages here and there can make a huge difference in moving the needle and extracting that value that's needed out of sports media to make it worthwhile to invest more and more into that space. So a good example to share for sure.

24:11Nick Meacham:Well, I was just going to say, even on that point about teams and things like that. I was speaking to someone at a Premier League club. They launched a YouTube channel in about the last two years. And they said like, we're not making a ton of money from YouTube, but we make enough money that I can hire two new people to my team. And those two new people to the point Andrew is making aren't necessarily there to do the grunt work, but it's to make the content even better. So even those marginal things in terms of money might also enable further creativity to do even better things or particularly stuff like branded content with partners.