‘Like refining oil’: How sports properties use tech to tap massive archives

Originally published by Sports Business Journal

The International Tennis Hall of Fame houses more than 25,000 artifacts at its Newport, R.I., facility. But if you stroll through the museum’s corridors, you will see only 2% to 10% of those items displayed.

The rest are stored in vaults — and, of course, the cloud, on the back of a broad effort by the ITHF to digitize its collections that began with a multimillion-dollar capital raise nearly a decade ago (a portion of which was dedicated to digitization).

Julianna Barbieri, the ITHF’s senior vice president of content and partnerships, said the ITHF’s system involves a web of third-party contractors (to photograph, scan and label items) and software providers (to manage the resulting digital assets).

It is a perpetual process. But it has already resulted in the creation of several digital exhibits, which provide a touchpoint to the ITHF for those who can’t visit the museum itself, and more streamlined workflows for the ITHF’s internal teams to respond to requests from researchers or corporate partners.

“It’s opened up the ability for us to storytell in a way we hadn’t been able to before,” Barbieri said. “And with the museum, it never ends, really, because you’re always bringing in new things.”

Need for nostalgia

Optimizing archive management is a matter of livelihood for sports museums.

For sports leagues and media companies, it can also boost external storytelling and, ultimately, revenue.

Heritage Werks, which provides archival services including digitization, physical storage, digital asset management and creative consulting to dozens of major U.S. sports properties from the Dodgers to the Falcons, broke into sports on the thesis that fans havea unique appreciation for their favorite team’s “heritage.”

On its face, it’s a hard point to argue. But the company backed the notion with numbers by conducting a study with data analytics firm ROAR that, after analyzing the social media activity of five major-sport franchises, found that “heritage-themed” social media content (e.g., an “on-this-day” post that resurfaces a decades-old milestone) generated 50% to 125% higher engagement than “non-heritage content.”

“When you know your fans are over-indexing on heritage, your programming will start to reflect that,” said Heritage Werks Executive Director Charlie Turano. “Our teams are understanding that this isn’t something they thought was a good idea. It’s something that’s been proven out by the numbers and the ROI, that fans are engaging.”

The U.S. Soccer Federation has found success leveraging its more than 100 years — and more than one “petabyte” (the equivalent of 1 million gigabytes) — of archival footage into fresh content and revenue. Of recent note, USSF licensed newly unearthed footage to the producers of an upcoming documentary about the 1994 U.S. men’s soccer team, and tapped its content library for brand campaigns with Chobani and Bank of America.

Nick Burton, USSF’s director of content distribution and media licensing, credited the artificial intelligence firm Veritone as a key technology partner in those activations. Veritone’s core technology is an enterprise AI platform called aiWARE, which automatically ingests and tags digital content, making it more discoverable in its Digital Media Hub software application. The company also has a sales team that helps clients license content within their digital archives to external buyers.

“We have what we might have previously considered ‘static assets’ of untold value, but also untouched value, and [are] realizing that, actually, there’s significant demand,” Burton said. “We can sit back and have people come to us [to license content] and tell stories, but we can also go out there and help guide the conversation and the storytelling and the fan engagement as well — and drive some revenue on top of it.”

Veritone does similar work for the content archives of sports properties such as the NCAA and Tennis Australia (which uses only Veritone’s content licensing services instead of its Digital Media Hub).

“It’s like refining oil,” said Sean King, Veritone’s chief revenue officer and general manager of commercial. “It’s there, you just have to find a way to extract it and put it into a place where it can be utilized.”

Age of AI

The McLaren Formula 1 team recently enlisted the longtime records management firm Iron Mountain to help digitize its vast archives, including old race footage and car blueprints.

Iron Mountain does not disclose many of its clients for security reasons, but says it works with major sports organizations, including the Lakers, to digitize and store artifacts. Part of its work with McLaren will bear fruit through historic footage aired during fan activations at F1 races.

Andrea Kalas, Iron Mountain’s vice president of media and archives services, said recent advancements in generative AI have greatly improved archivists’ ability to catalog collections via detailed metadata generation.

“Archivists, for literally a couple of centuries, have been trying to figure out how to provide access to their collections — whether it’s barcoding things or a Dewey decimal system,” Kalas said. “We’re always constrained by resources. There’s never enough staff to type in every single possible keyword, or every single possible cataloging term. This is the magic of some of the indexing that’s going on, to be able to have people actually find things that they otherwise would probably never have found. I think that’s the real magic in this ‘AI for good’ scenario of searching archives.”

Heritage Werks President and CEO Keir Walton posited that the importance of archive management will continue to grow in the age of generative AI. He said when Heritage Werks began its work in sports in 2009, teams were focused primarily on preservation and managing their archives efficiently, which developed into prioritizing the speed and volume of content delivery in the 2010s.

“Now it’s evolving into AI readiness for generative AI,” he said. “Because our clients have these centralized [archival] systems, it’s really the evolution.”

Rob Schaefer can be reached at rschaefer@sportsbusinesssjournal.com