Dalet Flex: Sports orgs flex their muscles
Posted on Nov 16, 2021 by FEED Staff
Sponsored editorial
Dalet Flex is helping sports organisations make the most of those magic moments
These days, even athletes have to become online influencers. As if winning the Premiership wasn’t enough, in your off hours, you have to share videos of your lunch with fans. Sports organisations understand there is a greater obligation than ever to share content above and beyond gameplay – and greater opportunities. Many clubs and leagues are taking responsibility for their own content and how it is managed.
Dalet Flex is a fully hosted content supply chain platform, helping companies create, orchestrate, deliver and monetise content. Flex’s open and extensible architecture is being adopted by many different sports entities to solve content access problems, generating new audiences and revenue.
“For some of our customers in the sports space, media production has not been their core business. It’s something fairly recent,” observes Dalet director of product strategy for media workflows, Lee McMullan. “Their main revenue comes through tickets, events, merchandise, sponsors – not necessarily through producing video.”
Like many companies working with media, Dalet customers have content stored in multiple locations with multiple permissions – for multiple customers – requiring many formats to be distributed on multiple platforms. Ad hoc in-house solutions can become fragmented.
“Flex can help reduce these silos,” says McMullan. “It takes that fragmented content and centralises it into a single, unified view. If customers already have their own systems, it can just orchestrate and be the glue across the supply chain.”
The National Rugby League of Australia, [NRL] had an external contract to manage its content before bringing it all in-house using Flex. They wanted a managementsolution for content, including more than ten years of archived video, to reduce the complexity for the team, the followers and customers who wanted access.
Dalet Flex has helped Arsenal streamline its distribution of VOD content to over 200 countries
Dalet helped the NRL deliver a higher content volume in less time, using the same staff – simplifying content publishing across multiple consumer platforms – where stills and footage can be made available to other organisations or the public for purchase, too. The NRL also provides services to teams in the league, so the Flex deployment is a way of getting easy access to selected content, allowing teams to contribute content back to the NRL.
Individual sports clubs can benefit from Flex, too. Arsenal FC delivers ‘glass-to-glass content,’ with media teams working from acquisition to distribution, creating not just game-related material, but behind-the scenes and lifestyle-related content. Arsenal wanted to make it simple for journalists and freelancers, many of whom work remotely, to contribute to and access that content for an increasing number of formats and distribution endpoints. Flex has especially helped Arsenal streamline its distribution of VOD content to over 200 countries, available on every device.
Another example is France’s Ligue de Football Professionnel, fully automating its content management system using Flex. Allowing outside agencies to manage all LFP content, including stills, video and metadata, and contribute it to the platform. Flex then automatically orchestrates that content for integration with LFP’s video CMS and WebCMS distribution partners, without LFP providing any technical input.
Flex is available on Dalet’s own hosted infrastructure as a subscription service, saving customers from hosting, maintaining and upgrading the system. With support for major cloud platforms, a microservices based architecture and extensible API, Dalet allows customers to build their own applications, too, offering tremendous opportunities for media companies to maximise their own unique assets.
This article first featured in the autumn 2021 issue of FEED magazine.
