Earlier this week, we covered data/infrastructure tech company Tempus Ex Machina’s growing list of partnerships expanding, with a deal with Chelsea following previous deals with the Pac-12 Conference and the NFL. At that time, Tempus Ex CEO Charlie Ebersol told AA “we’ll be announcing a couple more [partners] in the next couple of weeks,” and “you’ll begin to see a pattern of us really focusing on blue-chip partners.” Well, they’ve now made their next announcement, and it’s with an athletic department that has one of the more currently-discussed teams in college football; the Colorado Buffaloes, who made major waves this offseason with the hire of Deion Sanders as their new head coach.
This is Tempus Ex’s first deal with an individual collegiate athletics department. As with many of these previous deals, this will see Tempus Ex bring in their FusionFeed technology, which looks to “synchronize and deliver every available piece of data generated by every data and video vendor at a live sporting event — including every video angle, stats platform, and player tracker covering each play.” And while this is intended to apply across more sports than football, football will be an early priority, with a release saying that the Buffaloes “will immediately begin to deploy several use-cases this upcoming football season,” particularly noting near-real-time video for use in game preparation and review, making a range of highlights available to the school for their own social media accounts and athletes’ accounts, and providing more ways for the school to engage with fans. Here are some further quotes from that release:
“We’re excited to start this new era of Colorado football by investing in the best technology available for Coach Prime and his staff, student-athletes and our fans,” Colorado Senior Associate Athletic Director for External Affairs Alexis Williams said. “We believe that giving our student-athletes access to never-before-seen game highlights, immediately after games, will help them build their personal brands and establish a deeper connection and engagement with our fans.”
…“Having access to Tempus Ex’s technology will enable us to help our coaches and student-athletes with film study in a groundbreaking way, CU Director of Sports Video Craig Campanozzi said. “These tools will increase our efficiency, enabling us to save countless hours of time, and give us access to new game footage.”
“After breaking new ground with the Pac-12 Conference by empowering athletes to monetize their own game highlights, expanding access to fans, and helping to improve player health and safety, we are eager to integrate our revolutionary technology across Conference teams — starting with the University of Colorado,” said Annie Gerhart, co-founder and COO, Tempus Ex Machina.
…“We are always looking for new and innovative ways to help improve our video content and enhance our fan experience,” CU Director of Football Creative Services John Snelson said. “By partnering with Tempus Ex, we are gaining access to content that we’ve not previously been able to access and can now develop new digital interactions that will offer fans an exclusive perspective on the game and our players.”
As noted there, Colorado already has some experience with Tempus Ex and what they can provide through the company’s deal with the Pac-12. That partnership has involved Opendorse, Twitter, and Curastory to help student-athletes monetize their own highlights and commentary through NIL deals. But this specific Tempus Ex partnership with the Buffaloes looks to go even further.
And with so much attention on Colorado football in particular with Sanders coming in, there could be a whole lot of interest in this expansion of specific highlights, highlight monetization, and engagement with fans. So that makes sense as to why they would be the first individual school partner for Tempus Ex. As Ebersol told AA in that previously-mentioned interview, they’re really interested in providing great cross-platform data connectivity to let people build new things on their tech.
“Our technology ultimately is infrastructure. When we go into a sport or a stadium or a team, whoever our partner is, we’re not really going in and building a specific data capture tool, camera capture tool. We’ve built a system that allows you to take every available vendor that you have and pull them all together. And really, the dream is that whatever people invent will be invented on our technology.”
We’ll see how this partnership works out for both sides.
