CLIENT’S NEED
Biwenger is the fantasy football APP that is revolutionizing the market. Thanks to its alliance with the sports newspaper AS (Grupo PRISA), it has reached more than 20 million users and is breaking the rules of the game. The world of soccer APPs is very competitive and forces companies not only to reinvent themselves every day, but also to increase the value contribution to their users. It is in this fight to attract new audiences that Biwenger needed a differentiating element that Biyectiva could provide: ConnecTVty.
ConnecTVty is an patented technology that allows you to interact with any audiovisual content using your smartphone in a very simple way. By scanning the television, the user can obtain more information, access personalized content, and obtain promotions quickly and intuitively.
Together with Biwenger APP, ConnecTVty reached another dimension, becoming BiwengerCAM, a functionality that allows you to recognize live matches to vote for the best player of the match (MVP), enter private chat rooms, and gain access to raffles for shirts, signed football boots. and much more. Thanks to this, Biwenger APP managed to increase the engagement of its users, making them use the APP for longer periods of time while creating a stronger community around the "Biwenger AS" brand.
CHALLENGES AND DIFFICULTIES
The creation of the ConnecTVty technology was a challenge in itself, given the complexity of materializing the idea. Creating an Artificial Intelligence system that distinguishes between millions of potential audiovisuals (as many as television channels, movies, or series potentially exist) required a team with the capacity to work in the state of the art of Artificial Intelligence. Also noteworthy is that the system had to be scalable to millions of users and capable of processing images in real time. A huge challenge from a technological point of view: the response time should be very low (below 2-3 seconds) while the recognition accuracy should be as high as possible.
In addition, the integration of this type of cutting-edge technology, based on Computer Vision, in mobile APPs implied designing a Software Development Toolkit (SDK) that combined simplicity of use as well as customization capacity to be adapted to the case of each company - allowing for the definition of complex logical processes and their own desired visual characteristics. Therefore, the design of this SDK was a technical difficulty from the point of view of system architecture.
SOLUCIONES
ConnecTVty is a very powerful and extensible audiovisual content detection system. From an architectural perspective of this system, we find several components. Some are arranged in the user's terminal (APP components) meanwhile others are located in our private cloud (computing components).
To make it possible to distinguish between millions of audiovisuals, a cutting-edge technology for comparing videos in real time was developed. This technology is based on visual descriptors that generate digital signatures for each visual content. Machine Learning techniques are implemented to calculate a similarity factor between the television content and the Biyectiva database. Additionally, these descriptors are optimized for speed to enable real-time recognition of content.
Regarding the SDK to be incorporated into the APPs, it makes use of a RESTful API for sending audiovisual clips for comparison. At the same time, it opens direct communication with the server to receive the answers (match information, voting link to the MVP, or draw results). As for the components of the cloud, we find a complex system for extracting visual signatures for comparing audiovisual content, a system for receiving, managing, and responding to requests, as well as a memory database developed in-house capable of storing critical user information.
RESULTS
This set of systems that make up ConnecTVty make up a well-synchronized whole that allows the user to satisfy their desire to go beyond the audiovisual content broadcast on television.
During the time that ConnecTVty has been integrated into the Biwenger APP, it has had more than 80,000 unique uses from users in 37 different countries, demonstrating a quantifiable increase in engagement that materialized in the drawing of various prizes.
In addition, it was observed that the use of ConnecTVty increased considerably in derbies where the rivalry played a fundamental role. For example, the match with the most interactions was the Sevilla-Betis match on matchday 28, where more than 15,000 scans were counted. In addition, the engagement increased considerably in the breaks as well as the final moments of the game, where the spectators took the opportunity to vote for the MVP.
