AMSTERDAM -- Sept. 18, 2017 -- Ekstraklasa Live Park, the broadcast arm of top Polish football league Ekstraklasa, has signed an agreement with ChyronHego to equip all 16 of the league's arenas with the award-winning TRACAB(TM) image-based tracking system by the end of this year. TRACAB will enable live tracking of all movement of players and the ball on the field, and Ekstraklasa Park Live will use the resulting player performance data to enhance its live coverage of close to 300 LOTTO Ekstraklasa matches.
"Implementing tracking technology within our stadia will help to further improve LOTTO Ekstraklasa TV broadcasts and the overall quality of our product. It means that we will be collecting match data at the same level as other top European leagues," said Marcin Animucki, vice president of Ekstraklasa S.A. "Thanks to close cooperation with ChyronHego, the value of our league will increase significantly. This is also important in relation to the sale of our media rights, starting with the 2019/2020 season."
He added, "We want to share this data not only in TV broadcasts, but also in media reports, on our online channels, and in the future, on our mobile app. After installation of the system in all of our stadia, we will also be helping coaches and coaching staff by providing them unique fitness data. These analyses were never available as a common approach across Polish clubs, so this is an important step in our supporting role for team development."
With a special camera array at each LOTTO Ekstraklasa stadium, the TRACAB optical tracking technology uses advanced image-processing and data-extraction technologies to determine the position of all moving objects in the field of play -- including players, referees, assistant referees, and the ball. The result is a live data feed that contains the X, Y, and Z positional coordinates for each identified object. The data can then be streamed in an open format to a multitude of visualization platforms, such as broadcast graphics systems and online or mobile platforms, and it can also be used to prepare comprehensive sets of performance statistics for sports analysts.
"Each season, we try to raise the quality of our broadcasts. The introduction of the player tracking data to our live TV programming is an important step because it brings our coverage up to par with the best leagues in Europe," said Marcin Serafin, COO of Ekstraklasa Live Park. "We're especially happy that the data can be used not only to enhance the fan experience, but also by the coaching staff to improve player and team performance. TRACAB's high-quality, highly detailed data is a powerful new building block as we continue to raise the level of the competition in LOTTO Ekstraklasa."
After every match, the TRACAB data will be shared with the competing LOTTO Ekstraklasa clubs and will also be presented on the Ekstraklasa.org official website and all social media channels. Examples of the types of data captured include distance covered, number of sprints, speed of movement on the field, maximum speed, and average position.
"It's a privilege to add LOTTO Ekstraklasa to our expanding list of top football leagues, such as the Premier League, Bundesliga, and La Liga, and large international tournaments that have chosen TRACAB," said Rickard Öhrn, ChyronHego's president, EMEA. "The technology is becoming accessible to more and more leagues as they realize how the live data and applications that it drives create unique value for a wide range of stakeholders in football."
More information about TRACAB and ChyronHego's full product portfolio is available at www.chyronhego.com.
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About Ekstraklasa S.A.
Ekstraklasa S.A. is a joint-stock company, established on June 14, 2005, with terms agreed upon between PZPN (Polish Football Association) and football clubs that were then part of the first league. Shareholders of the company are 16 clubs from the highest football league (each with 5.8% shares) that together hold 92.8% of the stock while 7.2% of the stock is held by PZPN. The company manages league competition of the highest level of professional football in Poland. In LOTTO Ekstraklasa there are 16 top clubs from all over the country. Each season, TV and online audiences exceed 35 million, and almost 3 million fans watch competitions at the modern stadiums.
For more information on Ekstraklasa, visit http://ekstraklasa.org/news/category/10.
About ChyronHego
ChyronHego, a portfolio company of Vector Capital, is a global leader in products, services, and solutions for the broadcast and sports industries. Specializing in live television, news, and sports production, ChyronHego offers some of the industry's most widely deployed solutions -- including Lyric®, the world's most popular broadcast graphics creation and playout offering; the all-new CAMIO Universe newsroom workflow; and the TRACAB(TM) optical sports tracking system. Headquartered in New York, ChyronHego also has offices in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
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For more information on ChyronHego, visit www.chyronhego.com.
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