Germany’s 1. FC Köln adopted Newsbridge Cloud Media Hub, running on the MXT-1 AI engine, to centralise archived content for fast media search and distribution of content at scale.

Newsbridge Media Hub FC Cologne

Professional German football club 1. FC Köln has recently taken steps to centralise their archived content and support fast media search and distribution of player and match highlights at scale.

The club has adopted Newsbridge Cloud Media Hub and Mobile App, running on MXT-1 AI indexing, to improve its content workflows. FC Köln, who are three-time Bundesliga champions, use the Media Hub to ingest and automatically index the club’s huge library of digital assets, efficiently create content, and distribute media quickly to partners, players and fans via social platforms.

Local system integrator Qvest oversaw the Cloud Media Hub deployment and integration with 1. FC Köln’s existing media ecosystem.

In-House Video Production

“Newsbridge fulfills the team’s very specific requirements for in-house video production and content centralisation,” said Michael Rudolph, head of media and communication, at 1. FC Köln. “The fact that we can ingest and distribute our content to external parties, and on multiple platforms, has completely changed how we operate. Located in the cloud, Newsbridge’s Media Hub provides our team with high flexibility – whether they’re at the stadium working from the sideline or creating content remotely.”

Newsbridge’s Cloud Media Hub is able to store, index, search and manage 6,000 hours of video content and three million photos, and runs on the Newsbridge MXT-1 multimodal and generative AI engine. Multimodal AI can process, understand and, in this case – because MXT-1 is also generative – generate outputs for more than one type of data, that is, text, images, audio and video. FC Köln uses the Cloud Media Hub to rapidly detect content that matches their expectations for high editorial value.

Newsbridge Media Hub FC Cologne2

1. FC Köln’s media assets become fully searchable under this system, which includes facial recognition, object and logo detection, speech-to-text transcription and optical character recognition. The search technique takes advantage of relationships and inferences, in order to make logical, semantic associations between concepts.

Continuous Management

Over time, photos videos and other media assets can be ingested into Newsbridge through drag-and-drop, bulk uploads, live stream recording of a device on site or on-premises, or by configuring triggers from another entry point in the user’s system. Meanwhile, via Newsbridge’s Mobile App, players and partner agencies can directly access and share match and training photos across social media channels.

To manage the growing data, an automatic asset placeholder workflow was implemented via API to automatically log match information such as home team, away team, season, location and stadium, when content is pushed to the asset placeholders. Smart collections of this kind can be set up with simple search queries, so that all matching content is sorted automatically. 

The Newsbridge Cloud Media Hub is being integrated with Buffer social media post scheduling, JW Player and Stats Perform statistics analysis. These integrations are intended to synchonise sports data and enrich 1. FC Köln’s live and archived media assets, and result in faster, more efficient media workflows.  

“Newsbridge’s Cloud Media Hub with its state-of-the-art indexing, semantic search engine and sports data integrations enable football clubs to find pivotal moments in their large media collections in less than two seconds,” said Philippe Petitpont, co-founder and CEO at Newsbridge. “As one of the early adopters of our MXT-1 AI indexing technology, FC Köln has an advantage in supplying premium experiences to sponsors and fans.”

1. FC Köln is Newsbridge’s second German Bundesliga customer. Newsbridge’s other sports clients include Bayer Leverkusen, the Icelandic Football Association (KSÍ), French Federation of Football (FFF), the French Basketball Federation (FFBB) and the French Rugby League (LNR). www.newsbridge.io