It’s Game Six. Eleventh inning of the 2011 World Series. Third baseman David Freese, an unlikely hero, is at the plate. His St. Louis Cardinals are tied with the Texas Rangers 9-9 and face a long winter of what-ifs should they lose the ballgame.
Freese has captured the nation’s attention over the past two weeks with an unprecedented stretch of success at the plate. He stays hot, promptly belting a home run over the center field wall to save the Cardinals’ season.
The stadium explodes with cheers. Sports bars and living rooms across the country are electrified.
But me? I’m busy sprinting back to the tape library at MLB Network in Secaucus, New Jersey, to retrieve other examples of game-winning hits from historical postseason games. Some are actual Beta tapes, that I have to digitize, convert the footage, and then edit down to the precise moment the producers are looking for. All this done by hand, as soon as possible, to get it on live air.
This was my first World Series working for the MLB Network’s Media Management department. I was part of a team of six whose primary responsibilities were to oversee the video archive and Media Asset Management (MAM) system, log important studio show content and support live production by quickly retrieving any baseball moment from the game’s rich (and long) history.
Believe it or not, this was what innovation looked like 15 years ago – a frantic media manager thumbing through archives and running tape back and forth.
It doesn’t seem that long ago, but it also feels like light years.
The Current State of Sports Media
I’m reflecting on this time as I prepare for my first NAB conference as the Sports & Media Industry Principal at Presidio because I’m in awe of a few things. First, how far this industry has come technologically since my (and David Freese’s) glory days. But further, how uniquely positioned we are at Presidio to take full advantage of the opportunity on behalf of our clients.
Having worked closely with members of the Presidio team in the past, I have developed a strong appreciation for Presidio’s relentless co-innovation with clients to solve highly specific challenges. During my time at AWS, I had a front row seat to Presidio’s strategic partnership with the National Hockey League, transforming everything from the League’s broadcasts to the NHL Draft to On-Ice Official and player safety.
As this industry continues to rapidly evolve, Presidio’s practical and pragmatic AI approach is bringing significant opportunities to the forefront. Not only to improve clients’ operational efficiency but also enable more compelling and engaging content for dynamic audiences.
I can’t help but think how much easier our day-to-day would have been had these capabilities been around in the mid-2010s.
When the MLB Network entered a partnership with the NHL Network in 2015, I had the opportunity to lead the migration of NHL content to our internal asset management system and create new workflows for production allowing for easier access to video.
We also got to work closely with the marketing team to provide them with relevant content for social media pages. This required scanning through hours of studio shows and manually editing, clipping, and writing summaries for each clip. This process was similar when preparing our Sports Emmys submissions. We had to scan through a year’s worth of footage to find and extract the best moments of the year.
High-profile events like the All-Star Game and World Series always meant high demand for content at high velocity. We would ingest and distribute content for live studio shows, documentaries, and sales activations. Throughout these events, we’d capture 30+ terabytes worth of content within just days.
Broadcast networks today can use AI to automatically tag terabytes of video data in minutes. Media managers can use natural language queries to fire up an agentic workflow that clips highlights for them. Where I was watching hours of show footage and manually categorizing it for Emmy submissions, today’s teams narrow down their search and easily extract the most noteworthy clips in seconds.
The idea of logging video for hours becomes arcane with all the tools at our disposal. Now, instead, resources can focus on the more creative elements of broadcasting.
Presidio works closely with clients to create innovative solutions to optimize their daily workflows and modernize infrastructure to lean into this transformative technology.
One thing I take away from working in this industry from both the client, technology vendor, and consultant side, is while there are similarities in day-to-day operations for broadcasters, leagues, and sports teams, each one is different. Presidio’s listen-first, technology agnostic, and outcome-obsessed approach is refreshing and something I’m extremely excited to be a part of.
Schedule some time with me at the NAB Show to learn about how our modular approach to intelligent media take co-innovation to the next level, or attend the following sessions I’ll be participating in:
From Media Lake to Media Intelligence: Turning Content Archives into Searchable, Usable, Monetizable Assets on AWS
Date: Sunday, April 19
Time: 4:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Location: AWS Theater
Sports Theater Panel: Unlocking Live Cloud Production
Date: Monday, April 20
Time: 1:15 – 1:45 p.m.
Location: Sports Summit
Andrew Reich
Andrew began his career at MLB and NHL Networks where he spent 8+ years on the media services team. Andrew joined Amazon Web Services in January 2020 on the TMEGS Professional Services team, and spent two years in delivery, two years in the Sports Industry Specialty Practice and one year in the MEGS Business Unit. Andrew has led major cloud adoption initiatives and projects involving live and post-production, content data and analytics, media supply chain, MAM and archive migrations, and services deployments. Andrew is a seven-time Emmy award winner and graduated from Syracuse University.
