In this episode of the SLN Podcast, we speak to Tyler Steinhardt, Director of Marketing for the Premier Lacrosse League, and Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter. PhotoShelter is one of the leading visual media technology companies today and just announced how their artificial intelligence solution is powering a new partnership with the Premier Lacrosse League. Tyler spoke specifically how AI from PhotoShelter is saving his team hundreds of hours of work by auto-tagging pictures, and even automatically identifying brands on the field of play!
Podcast Highlights
3:45 – What is PhotoShelter: Andrew says, “So PhotoShelter is a visual media technology company and we work with the storytellers, the pro photographers, and also the brands who have massive amounts of visual content to manage.”
6:15 – Creating speed for content: Andrew says, “We’ve identified that the key thing is having a real-time, fast workflow that helps them move the content from the moment of capture and out to the market. And the faster we can get at helping the teams and the leagues move their content out to market, the more success they’ll have in expanding the visibility of that content.”
7:15 – Real-time workflow with MIRO: Andrew says, “We’ve been looking at artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to tag and keyword the content in an automated fashion so that the content can be instantly searchable and actionable as soon as it hits our system. And we finally met a partner that had the capabilities to deliver that for us, happens to be a company named MIRO.”
10:17 – The misery of tagging: Andrew says, “Tagging of content happens to be the number one most miserable piece of the professional photography workflow. And that’s the area that we hear the biggest cry for help.”
13:05 – PLL is built by players: Tyler says, “It was a brand new professional lacrosse league started by the players. And so the whole philosophy of what we were building was that it was built by the players. We understood what the player’s needs were.”
13:42 – Speeding up content distribution for players: Tyler says,“We wanted our players to be able to have 50 to 60 photos of themselves for each game they played in, hit their phone and be ready to post on Instagram and Twitter immediately following and the games they finished.”
16:40 – Photoshelter’s impact on the PLL: Tyler says, “Because we had the tagging from AI and PhotoShelter, we were actually able to help them find, for example, this player’s performing well. They can find the photo of that player in real time, searching it versus having to comb through hundreds of photos, which is the traditional process.”
21:55 – Creating useful data for brands: Andrew says, “The idea is not just to use this for tagging, but really to create a next generation, low capabilities, organizing the content, very dynamically, making sure that the system can have built in automation like triggers, that will act on what the system is seeing in the photography.”
26:48 – AI & the speed of workflow: Andrew says, “I think in the next 5 years that any tool that’s based on the management and distribution of your content, that doesn’t have a significant component that’s based on AI to help you either tag or organize or distribute your content. Without the AI, it’s going to be garbage.”
