Streamlined sports: Empowering youth athletes through live streams, highlights, and AI with IOIO and AWS

HiLYTE is an all-in-one digital platform dedicated to creating premier digital experiences through grassroots sports events and seasons. The company aims to make better technology available for all youth sporting organizations by creating contextual, personalized experiences using thousands of pieces of media.

Providing an end-to-end digital ecosystem for participants and spectators in two of the largest field hockey tournaments in the United States was an ambitious target. The tournaments—organized by 3STEP Sports—were logistically complex, with both scheduled during the same weekend in two different states. The tournaments included 500 teams with 5,000 athletes and 4,000 parents participating in more than 1,000 live events.

Creating a quality experience required advanced technology to capture the moments that matter—in real time—and allow spectators to save them as cherished memories, re-play them for team inspiration, and share them to create opportunities on and off the field.

HiLYTE recruited AWS Partner IOIO to do just that by providing a cost-effective, connected, digital experience for these in-person tournaments.

Leveling the playing field with access to better technology

There are very few options for youth sports organizations to capture media in a cost-effective way that allows participants and spectators to watch and save the media that is relevant to the specific players and teams they care about. For example, a player may want to capture great moments from a game to share with sports or college recruiters. A parent may want to keep and organize those moments as a digital scrapbook.

HiLYTE selected IOIO for its ability to automate AWS Media Services into a point-and-click set of workflows. This means that customers, like HiLYTE, can quickly procure and deploy AWS Media Services using an intuitive, user-friendly interface without the need for broadcast engineers, production staff, or capital expenditure.

HiLYTE automated its media capture and distribution workflow using the IOIO platform on AWS while managing all content in one place. The HiLYTE delivery system captured 50,000 images and thousands of clipped videos from live games and published the content to the HiLYTE customer-facing application. By downloading the HiLYTE application, athletes, coaches, and fans get a personalized experience whether they’re in person or watching from another location.

Capturing, storing, and delivering great game moments

HiLYTE didn’t want to just provide live footage of each game but preserve what truly mattered—such as a winning goal or a perfect team assist—for each player. To do that, the IOIO platform captured videos using Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) and clipped and converted them into video-on-demand (VOD) files through AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Each video clip was auto mapped to data related to that piece of media, including the team’s name, player’s name, team division, and game time. The IOIO platform then used Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network (CDN), to stream the content back to the consumer-facing HiLYTE application.

To ensure no player or team was left out of the highlights required that the cameras, data, and content for all 1,000 games, 500 teams, and 5,000 athletes needed to be auto clipped and sent to the application user’s account.

Taking personalization to the next level

In addition to processing a large volume of media and enhancing engagement in the application with a real-time digital experience, HiLYTE was able to further improve personalization by leveraging Amazon Rekognition to detect and analyze faces and associate faces to a user.

The application also includes community-driven elements such as a personalized content feed that leverages Amazon Personalize for media publishing, where spectators see the content for the teams or players they follow. Parents and spectators could use the application to take photos or videos from their phones and the content goes through the automated workflow for real-time video and image media capture and content delivery.

“Many youth sporting events lack a digital ecosystem that ties everything together. Through the HiLYTE and IOIO partnership, we have been able to productize AWS Media Services that provide the scale, quality, and automation of content. Our challenge was to manage large volumes of media with future capabilities around facial recognition,” said Garrett Shea, Senior Business Advisor to HiLYTE.

Conclusion

What’s next? IOIO is productizing Amazon Rekognition for more enhanced image recognition and video analysis to automate video clips of moments from games and provide images that parents, players, and fans want to see. Additional interactive video services built using Amazon IVS will be available in the app for viewers to interact with moments more fully, including stats, scores, media purchasing, and merchandise sales. Visit IOIO in AWS Marketplace

About IOIO

IOIO is in the business of providing automated end-to-end video workflows by productizing AWS Media Services. IOIO serves enterprises, service integrators, content producers, and broadcasters requiring immediate and cost-effective video solutions, including live streaming, event scheduling, content management, and server-side ad insertion.