Liverpool Football Club (LFC) has deployed so-called machine learning (ML) as a service from cloud storage provider Wasabi that will index and tag every frame of video footage owned by the club. The move will cut 5,000 hours of media management time annually and allow for the provision of “hyper-personalised” content to fans and partner organisations.
The service – WasabiAiR – is currently deployed by LFC on new video content that runs to many hours per game day and is being applied to decades’ worth of archive footage.
WasabiAiR is an add-on to the cloud provider’s existing storage services for the customer. It comprises a training phase in which the system learns to recognise – in the LFC case, for example – individual players, match details, game situations, and so on, using Wasabi infrastructure.
After training, data can be ingested and metadata tags created for every frame in the footage. That raw data is stored in a database in object storage, then given context information via media asset management software, such as Imagen or Scoreplay in the case of sports customers, to allow for rapid search and reuse.
Where footage would previously have been tagged manually or remained relatively opaque, use of WasabiAiR allows LFC to provide content tailored to fans’ personal details, demographics and geographies – to show players of a particular nationality, for example, or partner organisations that want footage with their logos visible.
Andy Fletcher, vice-president for technology and digital products at LFC, calls this “hyper-personalisation”. It’s the automation that allows that, he said.
“It has fundamentally changed the way we do business in that space,” said Fletcher. “It frees up a lot of time from manual tasks. We’re seeing well over 5,000 hours saved across the team over a year, which then allows us to pivot those resources into value-add activities.”
Fletcher referenced the benefits gained when Liverpool played Real Madrid in November 2025 and how it allowed LFC to publish content the same night, when previously it would have been hampered by manual processes.
“We were able to fundamentally change the way we took that to fans in terms of the rights we have,” said Fletcher. “We’re not allowed to broadcast until midnight because of UEFA rules, so historically we would have struggled to get to some good quality content by midnight because of all the manual tasks and processes.”
Fletcher pointed out that getting to key moments via metadata tagging was vital to the process.
“We’ve got the full game, and we could just play back the 90 minutes, but everyone’s seen that on other channels. So, what we can do is more analysis and pull out bespoke moments and specific points during the game. Rather than the VT editor saying, ‘Oh, we think it happened around about 50 minutes’, we can cut to the tags and the moments that matter.”
Tagging is frame by frame and identifies people and logos in the frame, as well as words spoken by announcers, such as “goal”.
“So, it gives you a timeline for the period of the game, frame by frame,” said Fletcher. “Who the people are, the words spoken, the logos seen.”
It can work the other way too, to remove content, which has been the case with sports customers in other countries that want to remove alcohol and tobacco advertising from footage.
In fact, it makes the entire archive much more accessible for use with partners, said Fletcher.
“If we want to do a particular campaign for a particular partner and around a particular player, we’re going to be able to search this or that season’s content or last game content and pull that out,” said Fletcher. “It could be launches around kits, jerseys, and being able to show specific action shots with particular coverage of a logo, for example.”
Fletcher couldn’t answer questions about whether this had led to any increase in partner revenues, but said it had allowed LFC to tell sponsors exactly how many times a logo had been visible during a game, for example, and its context, to allow the partner to use that content optimally.
“So, to someone like Standard Chartered, you can say, ‘In that picture of Mo Salah holding a trophy, your logo’s front and centre at this time’, and be able to serve that to them in a way they can use that’s appropriate for them.”
