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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Mon, 08 Dec 2003 12:27 |
Sports photography marketing company Empics was winner of the Growing Business Award for 'Technology in Business' in London.
Empics technology that delivers top quality sports images from camera click to online customers within 20 seconds looks set to race ahead of video clips for mobile sports content.
Growing Business Awards
The 5th annual Growing Business Awards are sponsored by the CBI and Caspian Publishing, whose magazines include Real Business.
Beating competition from across UK industry, Empics won the award for a clear technology strategy coupled with significant investment and real evidence that the investment is paying off.
The technology has already been successfully tested at a number of FA Premier League, UEFA Champions League and Football League matches. Earlier this year, EMPICS ran live web slideshows on Manchester United's official club website. It also provided similar images in other sports, from cricket's Twenty20 Cup to The Open golf championship.
Video Clips Don't Deliver
Although the purchase of mobile video clips rights was much touted as a winning USP for 3, the reality is that through a combination of technology challenges and content rights conflicts, the service has been unable to fulfill its promise.
"Delivering instant video clips to mobiles is proving too complex to capture timely, relvant content of sufficient quality" said Phil O'Brien, Chief Executive of EMPICS. "However, the real challenge is in working though the minefield of rights ownership" said O'Brien.
First there are the TV rights which clubs will do anything to protect the revenues from. This means for example that 3 is only able to deliver video clips after they have been broadcast on TV, which rather seems to defeat the object of the exercise.
Whose Images Are They?
The other challenge is resolving who has rights to still images. Photography has not so far been defined as a right that can be sold. While the press have always had free access, as these images are increasingly made available online, conflicts have arisen with club's desires to sell the images itself through its own web site.
Add into this the capability for a sequence of digital still images to look much like video and you start to get a measure of the challenges facing mobile sports content.
With 400,000 football fans subscribing to goal alerts and the recent Rugby cup win becoming the biggest ever texting day with 78 million texts sent in one day in the UK, the prize for sorting out the issues is a big one.
O'Brien said that Empics have been working with the whole community of rights holders for sports content for the past two years and believe that before the end of the current football season they will be delivering paid sports content to mobiles.
A trial at Manchester United last season proved to be successful. Users found that a story board sequence of shots was often more satisfying than video clips and can be delivered to mobiles while the game is in progres adding to the value.
Horse Racing
Now EMPICS is looking to introduce a new technology into horse racing starting with a trial underway at Sandown Park.
"This is an excellent way of helping racing fans around the country check on runners and winners, particularly the many people who want to follow the top-class racing we have here at Sandown, but who can't come to the racecourse," said David Morris, Managing Director of Sandown Park.
A total of 12 cameras are situated at key locations around the racecourse taking a series of pictures of all aspects of the race from the parade ring and the canter down to the start to the finish post and the winner's enclosure. Images of each horse in every race on the card enable mobile phone owners to access close ups of their fancied runners via MMS or the web.
"We see this new technology being of great value to race fans and the racing industry in general and hope to work with rights holders to cover more meetings by the end of the year," said Phil O'Brien, Chief Executive of EMPICS.
"Recent research on behalf of William Hill amongst high-value customers showed that the more content they received online before placing a bet, the more they were likely to bet and spend.
"Applying our technology to racing means that for the first time, fans can see the horses before the start wherever they are without relying on TV coverage. We can also focus on specific horses for owners and trainers and even send shots of the winners to members of a syndicate within seconds of the result," he added.
EMPICS www.empics.com
www.growingbusinessawards.co.uk
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