| By: Carolyn Braff, Managing Editor | Published: July 15, 2009 |
By Carolyn Braff
Sports fans want to stay in touch with their favorite teams, leagues, and players — especially when they are on their way to the game. To ensure that fans are clued in as they drive, ride, or walk to the stadium, Motorola has developed TuVista, software that delivers bite-size content to sports fans on their smartphones before, during, and after an event. UCLA volleyball is the first college program to test the system, and Bruins fans may soon be experiencing live events on a whole new platform.
Media Snacking on the Go
“TuVista is for fans who want to snack on key plays, events, highlights of a game,” says Frank Korinek, director of business & partnership development for Motorola. “We’re looking at enhancing the user’s experience in and around sporting events.”
Fans can access Motorola TuVista anywhere their smartphones have wireless access — which includes an increasing number of stadiums and arenas worldwide. However, TuVista offers an upside for the entire event experience, both inside and outside of that arena.
“It’s targeting people when they’re unwired, away from their desk, away from the ability to do what they might do normally through Web browsing,” Korinek explains. “It’s focused on concentrated media, based on a particular sporting event.”
From Macro Streams to Micro Clips
Motorola TuVista ingests multiple video streams, creates small video clips of event highlights, and aggregates related content into a bundle. That bundle is then published and managed by Motorola to ensure that fans can access the appropriate content directly from their smartphones. Before an event, the content might include season schedules, pregame messages from coaches, and game-day weather forecasts. During the event, content can range from injury reports and instant replays to MVP votes and concession listings. After the event, fans might access highlights and updated stats and standings and share photos. The content available in the bundles is limited only by the creativity of the content providers.
The scalable network- and device-agnostic software allows content providers and distributors, ranging from single teams or athletic departments to full leagues or conferences, to offer Motorola TuVista. The system works independently of any stadium infrastructure, so the Bruins can take the system on the road as well.
Building Bundles
Motorola TuVista’s bundle-publishing tool takes live video from up to five cameras, aggregates the content, and generates media bundles in MPEG files. The 30-second to two-minute clips are designed for limited-duration media snacking, but the tool also allows operators to add such content as advertisements, maps of the arena, player profiles, and team statistics. All of that content is then aggregated into a single bundle.
The Motorola TuVista bundle-distribution service manages all of the bundles once they are published and controls who can download them.
“The bundle-distribution service also provides rights-management enforcement,” Korinek says. “As a new bundle gets published, a notification goes into the Motorola TuVista application. When an end user goes to that event, there is information there about which bundles are available for the user to download and play.”
It takes video editors just 30 seconds to aggregate content into a bundle, and once the content is sent to the distribution service, it appears on a mobile device in seconds.
Currently, Motorola TuVista works on any mobile device that supports Java 2 Mobile Edition (J2ME) and Windows Mobile, along with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Blackberry and Android are on Motorola’s to-do list.
The Old College Try
In conjunction with the Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC) at UCLA, Motorola put together a trial of the TuVista solution for several Bruins volleyball matches last season. Although UCLA did not have high quality video equipment on hand, the test team was able to buy some consumer-grade HD video cameras to use for the trial, which worked just fine.
“The TuVista solution provides a very high-quality video,” Korinek explains. “It is only limited by the cameras being used to shoot the video and what the mobile device on which you’re viewing it allows.”
The UCLA trial involved a low-cost WiFi distribution from the camera into the video-production area and was overwhelmingly positive.
“We were just looking at the technology behind the system, since we are a university, but it was very impressive,” says Dr. Rajit Gadh, professor and director of the UCLA-WINMEC. “Our objective was to do research on any sport that would be available, and, at the time, volleyball was in session, but it could work for any sport.”
After completing the UCLA trials, Motorola took feedback from Gadh’s team and enhanced the mobile application, simplifying navigation and the tabs required to access the bundled content.
“We did some optimization within the distribution server to make sure that the bundles would download even faster,” Korinek adds.
Motorola also completed a successful trial with British Telecom during the Paralympics World Cup Event in Manchester, England, and is currently in talks with several content-distribution companies.
“College is one market that we’re going after, but we’re taking TuVista globally to leagues, teams, and venue owners,” Korinek says. “We have pricing models that will support individual universities, teams, stadium owners, all the way up to major leagues — not just the content initiators but also the content distributors.”
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