Promoting innovation and creating new solutions to drive forward the digital transformation are among adesso’s central guiding principles. That means the investment in the start-up soccerwatch.tv, which has developed a trendsetting business concept in the areas of digital transformation and cyber-physical systems, is perfect for the company.
The concept for soccerwatch.tvis to broadcast and market amateur football games. The company has also developed a fully automatic camera system that captures games from a floodlight mast and has a 180 degree field of view. It allows viewers to watch games with familiar camera work and image quality, via live stream or on demand, and they can also access highlight reels. soccerwatch.tv’s offering is available at home or using mobile devices – via PC, tablet or smartphone.
The combined hard- and software solution was entirely developed by soccerwatch.tv. adesso’s experts helped the soccerwatch team programme a machine-learning algorithm for optical image recognition using the Azure Cloud.
soccerwatch.tv was founded by Georg Moser, Bernd Holarek and Jonathan Overhoff, who all have proven entrepreneurial and technological experience. The company received an EXIST start-up grant, which the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie – BMWi) awards to promote “innovative technology-oriented or knowledge-based projects with significant unique features and good prospects of economic success”. The 20-person soccerwatch.tv team is also supported by a number of universities, particularly the University of Duisburg-Essen.
“Cyber-physical systems are at the heart of the digital transformation, because they directly integrate physical objects and procedures into digital processes. The camera system and streaming service from soccerwatch.tv are an outstanding example of the new opportunities that such systems create,” stressed Prof. Dr. Volker Gruhn, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of adesso AG. “That is why adesso wants to help this automated hard and software solution for the video streaming of amateur sports achieve rapid success with its technical and financial support,” he added.
