During the broadcast of the finals of the 2021-22 China Men’s Basketball Professional League (CBA), the video workflows behind the delivery of the competition to viewers’ screens were made possible through a collaboration between Alibaba and EditShare. Particularly, the latter’s Flow media management tools allowed media companies to upload, download, edit and manage the delivery of the games.
EditShare’s open architecture allowed for customisation of the Flow web user interfaces for CBA, providing each registered user with tailored functionality. This allowed the crew on-site to upload all the video material to the cloud, where CBA officials, sponsors, rights-holding media organisations and other registered users were able to search and download content. Security restrictions were also applied to ensure no unauthorised person could access the video.
The purpose of the cloud-based distribution platform was to ensure content was available to all entitled users as quickly as possible. To do so, EditShare designed the web-based user interfaces for all classes of users, in the Chinese language, to make content searches, access and downloads as intuitive as possible.
Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer for EditShare, said: “Live sports does not have time to wait for video distribution systems to catch up — fans want to see the live action and all the replays immediately. Flow from EditShare provides access to thousands of assets from wherever you are, especially with cloud access like this project with Alibaba.
“Flow also supports all the popular editing platforms, so each user can decide for themselves how they want to work with the content, and what is most appropriate for them.”