LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
Other graphics players looking to the cloud include Australian start-up LIGR, founded by Sydney-based Luke McCoy. It’s a white-labelled automatic graphics platform, aimed at raising the production values of grassroots sports events in their live streams. The Queensland Rugby League and Aussie rules football tournament Football NSW are using LIGR’s HTML-based graphics templates to ensure its lower-tier club matches – usually shot on a single camera – are up to the same production standards as higher-level, multicamera events. Like Singular, LIGR has its own API, and its templates integrate with a number of data APIs and vision mixers, as well as AWS Elemental Media Live. While LIGR might not offer the same authoring environment or interactivity as Singular, there’s more of an emphasis on features that build sponsorship integration, providing new revenue streams. On its website, LIGR claims to have enabled clients to activate over $1m in sponsorship money. INDIE GRAPHICS DEVELOPERS Elsewhere, content creators operating in the mid- level events sector are starting to develop their own flexible, live graphics-based solutions that don’t require cumbersome hardware or long contracts. Two years ago, Dutch company Stream My Event launched a commercialised version of the software it developed on jobs such as the World Solar Car Challenge (covered in FEED #24) and the NAB Show. “We needed super-flexible solutions that allow for last-minute alterations – a change in speaker line- up, for example, might mean a last-minute change of a lower third,” explains Stream My Event and Holographics co-founder, Floris Porro.
does not do VR/AR or heavy 3D rendering. But Ward does claim the company’s HTML-based graphic overlays can offer next-generation functionality that traditional systems cannot. He also says these ‘intelligent overlays’ can be rendered on each end-user ’s device. “We call this ‘On Device’ rendering and it enables localisation, personalisation, interactivity and much more,” says Ward. “Viewers could all be watching the same video, but with different graphics, including their own team colours or message from different sponsors – or even in different languages.” Powerful, traditional graphics systems also tend to be out of reach for the majority of content creators, and Oehm’s vision for Singular was to remove the barriers to entry, enabling anyone to add broadcast- quality graphic overlays to live content. As such, the platform is being used to enhance the production values for many lower-tier sports matches, including the Danish Second Division and Liga Primera, the Nicaraguan Premier League.
BEHIND THE HEADLINES Sky News used Singular to create a YouTube channel dedicated to the George Floyd murder trial
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