A friendly location-aware system to facilitate the work of technical directors when broadcasting sport events

Abstract

The production costs of broadcasting sport events that require tracking moving objects are continuously increasing. Although those events are very demanded by the audience, broadcasting organizations have economical difficulties to afford them. For that reason, they are demanding the development of new professional (software and hardware) equipments that lead to a considerable reduction of the production costs. In this paper, we present a software system that takes into account these needs. This system allows a technical director to indicate his/her interest about certain moving objects or geographic areas in run-time. The system is in charge of selecting the cameras that can provide the types of views requested on those interesting objects and areas. So, it decreases the human effort needed to produce (create, edit and distribute) audiovisual contents, giving at the same time the opportunity to increase their quality. For this, the system provides a friendly interface to specify requirements and obtain which monitoring video cameras attached to moving or static objects fulfill them, along with a query processor to handle those requests in a continuous and efficient way. We illustrate the feasibility of our system in a specific scenario using real data of a traditional rowing race in the Basque Country.