One in eight people now watch Formula One. This once-dwindling sport has made a remarkable comeback, thanks to a focus on storytelling supported by technology advances. These insights were revealed by Ruth Buscombe, Race Strategist at Formula 1, speaking at the “Pushing the Limits: AI Innovation in Live Sports with Formula 1” session on the Future Tech Stage today.
Short-form media is huge for F1’s viewership, 40% of which are under 35. “Tools like Amazon Nova and its AI capabilities make capturing video less labour-intensive,” said Buscombe. “This allows us to create edits for socials, overtakes, and compare an overtake to one that happened 20 years ago, thus educating fans on the legacy of the sport.”
Chris Blandy, Director of Strategic Business Development, Media and Entertainment, Games and Sports at AWS, also reported that younger audiences are engaging on mobile-first experiences. “F1TV started as a linear TV platform. Since then, F1 has innovated by building out F1 TV Premium, the direct-to-consumer offering with multi-camera views, which is now available to consumers as a way to engage,” he said.
Each F1 car produces 1.1 million data points per second, and AWS is helping to capture this “treasure trove” of data. “We stream it into the cloud and build advanced workflows around that dataset, both for team performance but also reflecting into the fan experience,” said Blandy.
Accelerated computing and the cloud are both vital for delivering hyper-personalised video feeds, according to Rick Champagne, Director of Media and Entertainment Industry Strategy and Marketing at NVIDIA. He said: “Everything in the system needs to be accelerated, and there has to be some AI, models or agents to transform that video, and latency needs to be stripped out.”
Channel 4 recently extended its Formula 1 production deal with Whisper. Discover more here.
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