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- Premier League and Oracle entered technological partnership last year
- Archive expected to reach three petabytes by 2025
The Premier League has migrated its entire historical video archive to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure (OCI), a move which is designed to reduce costs, drive efficiency and unlock a range of new capabilities for the league’s broadcasting operations.
The archive includes every single match from English top flight soccer’s 30 years, and with technological advances improving the quality of this footage, the amount of storage required to host this data is increasing all the time.
Indeed, the league believes its archive will amount to three petabytes by the end of its current domestic television deal in 2025.
Instead of investing in physical infrastructure that requires upfront costs, physical space and maintenance, the Premier League transfers every single match, along with pre and post-match interviews, to the cloud.
US technology giant Oracle manages the infrastructure and automatically applies updates, reducing the maintenance burden and enhancing security, while the Premier League’s storage can be increased automatically.
The video data stored in the cloud is used by the league and its global broadcast partners for their programming, licensed to third parties for documentaries and advertising, and for a variety of other uses cases.
The data is stored in four of Oracle’s cloud regions – the UK, the US, Singapore and Brazil. This model makes the system more robust and resilient, but it also improves performance for partners around the world because they are able to access incredibly large files much closer to home.
“Simply put, the Premier League’s worldwide broadcasts are the linchpin of the league’s relationship with its global fan base,” said Nick Morgan, managing director of Premier League Productions.
“Showcasing the best football players in the world requires the best technology, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers the performance we need to get fans around the world as close to the action on the pitch as possible.”
The arrangement forms part of a wider technological partnership between the Premier League and Oracle, which has seen the company create real time stats based on historical match data. These insights are used across broadcast and digital channels, helping to drive fan engagement.
“As the Premier League’s popularity continues to explode worldwide, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure helps to ensure that Premier League content is cost-effectively delivered to its partners around the globe at the highest quality,” said Karan Batta, vice president, product management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“Equally important, with OCI the Premier League can continue to take advantage of advances in video quality and innovations in broadcast technology to meet rising fan expectations with zero concern about storage capacity.”
