YouTube, Instagram and Vimeo have their place. Each have massive worldwide audiences to whom the best aspects of your sport can be showcased…
But when you have 1,240 videos from your last world championships (not to mention the 13,000 from the past year and the 9,000 from the year before that), the job of getting all that content online is tough and don’t forget that each one of those 1,240 videos has to be described or keyworded, because if not, nobody finds them and the time spent uploading was in vain.
For organisations like the European Judo Union, Dartfish has considered these problems and has some interesting answers.
The all-important keywording starts right from the moment of import from the camcorder. Say you are doing a bulk import of recordings, each could have general information such as the competition and year assigned at this point, personalization by player being added after import.
In fact the EJU are capturing their fights live, streaming them direct to the software such that all relevant keywords are added to each as they happen. Live streaming gives them a further benefit because the video is encoded and compressed as it is captured. Right away, it is internet-ready and, with file sizes 16 times smaller than the original video, upload times are dramatically reduced. To put some numbers on that, an average fight is 37MB rather than 600MB. Put that way, you can see why it is useful to get the compression done before upload rather than afterwards!
The top ten most viewed videos on Judo Video have an average of 1700 hits. Now, that’s a long way off the hundreds of thousands that one might expect from popular judo videos on YouTube but the EJU are not seeking a mass audience for these videos. They are providing a way for players, their coaches, families and friends to seek out video specific to them. They are providing an archive of performances to enable scouting and to drive improvement in their sport. Their dartfish.tv channel is their’s so searches reveal their videos and their’s alone.
So if you are Carlos Luz for example and you want to review your second round performance at this year’s world championships. You have the EJU, Dartfish and dartfish.tv to thank that it’s been easy to get that video online… even if only you and your coach have taken the trouble to watch!
