Cognitive Mill™: Fixing Problems With Making Sports Highlights Reels

Let’s cut straight to the chase: you already know how important the best moments compilations are for getting more people to watch sporting events.

To stay on top of the media world, you are now looking for an effective way to make highlight reels of the most memorable dunks, home runs, touchdowns, and goals.

But it is not that simple. Let’s discuss the problems you might encounter when cutting highlights from sporting events — and how you can use Cognitive Mill™ to fix them.

You can’t make sports highlights reels quickly enough

In the modern media world, the speed of content distribution plays as big of a role as the content quality itself. You just can’t be on top of the news if you are slow.

Since everyone and their mom has a smartphone now, media companies have to compete against regular sports fans who can record the high drama moment by just pointing their phone at the TV.

And that clip can go viral well before you get your hands on the game footage.

Compared to the earlier days, when sports companies had dedicated editors who cut the whole game into short clips manually, you can now use automated sports highlights makers to do that much quicker.

Cognitive Mill™ is very effective in that regard — it applies Artificial Intelligence algorithms to the footage to identify the most important moments of the game, cut them, and then edit them into a highlight compilation. The whole process is performed automatically, so you do not need any human assistance.

With Cognitive Mill™, the compilation will be ready in minutes after the game, giving you the chance to share the clip on social media before the players can even hit the showers.

In addition to that, the speed of the tool allows you to handle large volumes of video content — Cognitive Mill™ offers scalable cloud infrastructure running on multiple clouds. This way, you can have it working with thousands of video minutes per day and not lose in terms of processing speed or accuracy — which is always handy during the busy sporting season.

Your automated sports highlights generator misses important shots

So you have a sports highlights reels maker of your choice all set up and running.

It pulls the footage and cuts the most important moments of the sporting events: the best dunks, player conflicts, fan reactions, hilarious mascot dances, and so on.

But then you come across a shot from social media or on television that you haven't seen in the highlights reel that you got.

Upon reviewing the game footage, you find out that the tool you use has missed some of the more high drama moments.

With the modern news cycles, it is essential to capture those moments accurately to appeal to your audience. If you fail to do so — someone else won’t.

To combat that with Cognitive Mill™, we apply scene-level analysis to figure out what moments of the game are the most memorable and thrilling.

The thing is that most of the other sports highlights reels makers have a certain way they detect the scenes to cut: they can use object recognition to catch the change of in-game score or analyze the audio to hear the audience cheering.

And those approaches pose a serious problem in terms of flexibility:

• There are some sports with less vocal audiences, and also many games are held with no audience at all due to the health-related limitations;
• Apart from goals and touchdowns, there is a ton of stuff happening on the field that can interest the audience: players can have some back-and-forth with a referee, or the coach may go nuts after his team is crushed by the opponent.

In that case, the sports highlights generation tool may miss memorable parts of the event.

We do not rely on simple recognition techniques to catch a highlight: our human-like learning process understands the context without the external data to identify the most decisive moments of a sporting event.

Cognitive Mill™ possesses the level of visual understanding that allows it to decompose the game and capture each highlight accurately. The tool carefully analyzes the game dynamics, the level of excitement, and imitates the human perception of the event to not miss the best in-game moments.

You can’t customize your sports highlights maker

You set up the automated sports highlights reels generator to streamline the sports footage processing and make it more effective in terms of scale and speed.

And then you realize that you still have to dedicate additional resources to make sure that the tool correctly processes tricky footage, and then manually edit the clips to share them on social media or air them on television.

So, some of the highlight reels tools are not flexible enough to fit within your video production workflow, and in this case, you have to come up with workarounds to make the whole thing somewhat manageable. For example, rely on additional video editing software for sports highlights reels.

Cognitive Mill™ offers a way to make the production as seamless as possible.

To start off, we integrate the tool into your pipeline through the API. There is no wonky UI to deal with, no timelines, no confusing settings — you just set the highlight generator up and have it deliver the most accurate results in minutes.

The absence of a user interface does not necessarily mean that you can’t configure Cognitive Mill™. It offers the ability to edit the highlights that it cuts from the game footage so you get the best result for your content strategy.

Here are some of the parameters that you can set:

• The type of highlight: high drama moments, goals, or on-field conflicts;
• The length of the video clip;
• Other types of compilations: Cognitive Mill™ divides the game into semantically finished parts so you could get a compilation of anything important happening in the game. So you can generate videos like a game summary or the mascot dance compilation.

But you do not have to spend the time to configure the algorithm itself — Cognitive Mill™ perfectly understands the context of the footage, so it can accurately cut the highlights from such dynamic sports as hockey or football, and more hasteless ones like golf.

You spend too much money on AI highlights generation

Despite having set up an automated sports highlights generation tool, you still have to spend money on top of that to further manage the content that you get.

After you get your highlights cut from the game footage, you have a human editor take those clips and edit them into the compilation, add the graphics and then have a social media person share them everywhere.

Even though the sports highlights reels are generated automatically, you still have a ton of work to do by yourself: as soon as the sporting season begins, you will definitely find yourself overwhelmed with large volumes of videos from various events.

But there is a solution that can augment your sports content generation to a much greater degree by automating more tasks.

СognitiveReelz™ is a part of a CognitiveMill™ cloud platform that imitates the way humans think while analyzing video content.

Apart from cutting the highlights of basketball, hockey, or football matches, you can also use the platform to automatically:

• Crop the footage from landscape to portrait aspect ratio for a better viewing experience on mobile;
• Share the clips on whatever social media platform you choose;
• Detect moving graphic overlays to choose sports replays, ads, show openings etc;
• Apply nudity detection to filter the parts of the video that might be inappropriate.

With all of those tasks performed without human participation whatsoever, you will be able to drastically slash the costs of your video production while remaining highly effective at delivering quality content to your audience.

Get your sports highlights reels generation under control

A successful content strategy is a good balance of speed and quality: if you take too long to deliver top-notch content, you won’t get far. On the other hand, no one will watch the bad content even if it is delivered quickly.

It is essential to provide the audience with the most memorable moments of a particular sporting event as quickly as possible. Dunks, fights, press conference quotes — all of that content can not only keep the audience glued to their TVs, but also encourage them to share it on social media, therefore expanding your reach.

To do that, you need a sports highlights maker that correctly identifies the clips worth sharing and edits them into a compilation ready for distribution on social media or news updates.

In that case, Cognitive Mill™ has you covered. It needs no external data to operate: thanks to the human-like level of visual understanding, the sports highlights reels generation is accurate and fast.

Moreover, you can take advantage of other tools provided by the CognitiveMill™ cloud platform: crop the footage for the mobile screen, add graphics to the clips, and share them on social media automatically.

Cognitive Mill™ is easily scaled over any volume of video content you are working with — so you can be sure that none of the clips get lost during the most heated of events.

Want to start working with AI highlights generation? Reach us at support@cognitivemill.com or use the form below. We will be happy to answer any questions, demo the solution and discuss the terms.