To kick off the new Ligue 1 season with a bang, Canal Plus, the French pay-TV broadcaster, has introduced Canal Football App, a second-screen application designed for Canal Plus subscribers. The app, which uses EVS’ second screen media delivery platform, C-Cast, was successfully launched during the live broadcast of the first headline match of the season.
The new app, conceptualized by CANAL+ Sports with the help of the engineering department at CANAL+ and the NetcoSports group for the design and the interface, is the first of its kind, providing up-to-the-minute statistics, multicam video clips of highlights and bonus material such as super slow-motion action replays in full length. It also features filmed reactions from the commentators and special guests from Canal Plus’ live football program, Canal Football Club, as well as the possibility to interact via social networks.
The app is available on iOS for iPad users, and on Android for Samsung Galaxy tablets.
All of the app’s content is fed through EVS’ C-Cast; its automated hardware and software solution. C-Cast instantly processes and transfers live multicam media recorded on EVS’ XT/XS production servers, along with descriptive metadata and third-party items (graphics and statistics), direct to web-connected tablets with the Canal Football App.
During the match, producers Euro Media France, created clips and associated metadata, such as keywords describing the action and timecode references, using EVS’ content production management suite, IPDirector. Key action shots and their references were then automatically transferred to C-Cast’s central database, where they were available in multiple angles, and in a proxy file format — made possible by EVS’ synchronized multicam recording process. Graphics showing match statistics — created with Symah Vision technology — were also integrated into the database using the system’s advanced API architecture.
As a result, the C-Cast database could feed the linked web interface with the packaged media, in less than two minutes, direct to football fans.
