The University of Kansas is expected by many to continue to advance through this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. But some in the school’s athletic department are already focused on baseball season with an eye toward a new technology partnership.
That’s because the Jayhawks recently struck a deal with Reely to use deep learning and artificial intelligence to create automated highlights for Kansas athletics, beginning with its baseball team.
We are proud to announce our partnership with @KUBaseball to deliver highlights for all of their home games in 2018! After 8 games these automatically generated clips have yielded 100k views on Twitter alone. #RockChalk #Kansas #AI #tech https://t.co/yBJDCYb9Gc
— REELY (@GetReely) March 14, 2018
It appears Reely’s first highlight reel captured an important home run that put the Jayhawks over St. John’s, long a college baseball powerhouse.
Congrats to @KUBaseball on sweeping their first ranked opponent since 2014 with consecutive wins versus No. 20 St. John's! Highlights proudly powered by @GetReely. #KUbaseball #Kansas #RockChalk #AI
https://t.co/cL4ICvgC1b
— REELY (@GetReely) March 13, 2018
SportTechie Takeaway:
For Kansas, the deal with Reely opens up new avenues for fan engagement and sponsorships. For Reely, the partnership adds another high-profile client to the company’s expanding roster and further proves that artificial intelligence will be a part of sports well into the future. Reely’s recent deal with the St. Louis Blues and its participation in Stadia Ventures’ sports accelerator provide momentum for the company to approach and ink professional sports teams to deals with the promise of automated highlights that can be distributed across those teams’ digital and social media properties to drive fan engagement.
As for artificial intelligence as a whole, this past summer IBM worked with Wimbledon and the U.S. Open to clip and curate automated highlights in real time based on crowd noise, player reaction and other factors, and instantly provide the content to fans. Reely uses a team’s video feed—the same one watched by millions of fans—and uses deep learning and computer vision to pick out highlight-worthy plays. The end result is practically the same: Teams and organizations can satiate their fans’ hunger for instant, shareable content.