Collegiate Images Taps XOS To Build Digital Archive

By Ken Kerschbaumer

Collegiate Images, a video-rights clearinghouse for colleges, conferences, bowl games, and more, has inked a deal with XOS Technologies that will move Collegiate Images (CI) out of the tape-based realm and into file-based workflows for content ingest and delivery. The move will make CI content more quickly available to producers of commercials, movies, and other content and will also protect content via digital watermarking.

“With content, especially football games, by the time you get to Wednesday, the last game is history, and the next game is the most important. So getting the content from campus to consumer more quickly enhances the value of the content,” says XOS Technologies CEO Randy Eccker. “Collegiate Images has relied on FedEx to get in tapes and has had a time-consuming process of editing from analog tapes into digital formats.”

The XOS interface will allow film, video, photos, newspaper articles, and audiotapes to be ingested into a digital archive. Metadata will categorize the content and make it accessible for searching and duplication.

XOS will make a “strategic investment” in Collegiate Images and have a co-located facility in Orlando, FL, with a smaller facility in Fort Lauderdale, FL. In the future, CI content partners, such as colleges and conferences, will take advantage of Internet2 and its 100-Gbps network to zip over highlights and video from a variety of collegiate sports. “They’ll be able to deliver content in almost real time on the same day of an event,” says Eccker. “A content-delivery process that used to take five to seven days can now be completed within 24 hours.”

XOS and CI will have a tight collaborative relationship, with some overlap in operations, says Rich Routman, CI SVP, sales and business development. “A lot of our content is already digitized on the XOS system. We installed that technology in June and started the process in anticipation of the deal.”

He says CI clients will be able to search and retrieve and have content delivered online.

The Big 12 conference has already begun using the system in a beta trial. All coaching video and content produced at the schools is sent to the Ft. Lauderdalefacility, where it is watermarked.

“Watermarking is key,” Eccker explains, “because it allows for enforceable copyright protection.”