Vizrt Sports enables football organisations to store, manage and distribute media assets to a variety of platforms, and their products are used globally by leading broadcasters including ESPN, CNN, BBC, Sky Sports and ZDF.

Football is so much more than just this week’s game. We remember great football commentators because of their ability to compare current performance of the players with previous triumphs. Their secret is to put the great stories and moments from the past into a new context.

Now, a growing number of football clubs and federations are discovering that by reworking footage from past matches, they can create a whole new experience for fans. It not only enlarges and activates the group of supporters; it’s the key to developing new revenue streams.

So why isn’t this happening faster? The challenge is that often the club’s heritage is locked away on tapes in vaults. It is not accessible to anyone except a librarian. It’s taking up shelf space without doing anything useful. You can’t access it online, in the same way you can search for a book title.

But recent digital technology now makes it possible to exploit those archives in new ways, mixing and mashing- up great stories of the past to fit emerging media platforms.

In order to increase the revenue from content they already own, clubs need to do more than simply exploit the realtime broadcast, cable and mobile rights. They currently assume that supporters just want to see the same realtime content repackaged across different devices. I believe that’s only a small part of the picture, because this approach doesn’t really help the club improve the relationship with its fans.

We’ve been working with clubs and leagues to develop software and scenarios that help them quickly find relevant archive material. It then uses a comprehensive graphics package to make footage look exciting on all kinds of screens – from mobile to the living room, even the high-definition screens that have appeared in the stadium.

In fact it means building a crossmedia strategy that really involves the fans. This has involved examining how fans can be drawn to the stadium earlier (through exclusive pre-match interviews and messages from loyal fans projected on the big screen). The longer they spend inside the stadium, the more they tend to spend. But it also means looking at the kind of services that fans want during and after the match. This is no longer a dream but a proven concept.

During the 2006 season, the Norwegian Football Federation deployed the Vizrt Media Asset Management system to capture the Premier League matches, make them available to clients, and stream content to the Internet. In addition, the NFF is now able to re-format and distribute selected highlights to mobile phone subscribers, who use that content to have conversations with their friends.

The fans’ passion for the game, players and clubs is driving the new revenue streams.

But to do this properly means fast, intelligent manipulation of live match coverage, archive footage and ‘personalised’, on-demand, exclusive content.

Football clubs need to re-examine the way they issue media rights. We’re now in an age where the shelf-life of the content is no longer linked to a specific transmission date.

In fact, this industry is moving in the same way as Hollywood, with the content being labelled with different rights depending on the distribution platform. The fact that the mobile rights for the South African World Cup in 2010 were sold before the TV rights is significant.

Managed properly, the archived content can generate revenue over a much longer period than we’ve experienced until now for just a modest investment.

Subscription services and ‘personalized’ content are still in an early phase of development. Sports magazines and the sports sections of general interest newspapers are always looking for photos to illustrate stories. Your digital archive is obviously the best source for video and stills. New sponsorship opportunities By carefully mixing the past with the present, all kinds of new sponsorship opportunities are opening up to advertisers. Short banner ads before ondemand streams to mobiles, branding around SMS-MMS message boxes and customised video players are just some of the possibilities. V.I.P. lounges, the giant digital displays in the stadium, and banners are other perfect examples for the direction the industry is going. Empowering the fan community Currently, many clubs simply use the web as an outlet for merchandising, ignoring the fact that that online websites and communities are perfect vehicles for increasing fan loyalty and drawing fans into forthcoming events. Imagine being able to log-in to your favourite club and get access to exclusive content, vote for and comment on favourite players – this offers the feeling of true participation and a say in the future direction of the club.

Linking such log-in’s to various grades of membership allows the club to offer a variety of packages to match different interests. The aim is to move the fans from silver to gold membership, for example, by offering exclusive content first to those who have taken out the higher-ranked package.

The active fan-base is no longer limited to those living within range of the stadium. Many clubs have loyal fans living abroad, who are delighted to become involved if invited to do so. Reasonably priced streamed-video access to home games, special commentaries (perhaps biased in favour of the home team) are all ideas that are rolling out in practice.

The role of the football club’s electronic archive is going through a revolution. It is no longer a passive archive, where videotapes are stored for posterity. It moves to become the centre of a production chain, containing material which may have been captured one tenth of a second ago – or it may be 40 years old.

To make it into an active archive, the content needs to be digitized and stored. It also needs to be labelled so that search engines can find the right material fast enough. Once found, the material can be edited, then converted into a format that matches the required screen size, something of great importance, especially when it comes to graphics. (If you have ever watched broadcast television graphics on a mobile phone, you’ll see immediately why the titles need to be rendered in a different way – normally they are unreadable.)

The key to getting this right is to design the proper workflow. How will content get into and out of the archive engine – and how will it be manipulated before it reaches the consumer or business partner? Since these types of questions have been facing broadcasters for more than a decade, I’ve found that many of the answers have already been put into practice in that sector of the industry. That’s good news for the sports world that it can learn from the experiences of others. I am excited about the next phase for the sports industry. It’s good business for all of us and provides a path to profits that’s broader than broadcast television. For more information please visit www.vizrt.com, or you can react directly to Martin’s comments by e-mailing him at mbu@vizrt.com.