Basketball |11 January 2023

SBF’s executive committee member Biko Biong is responsible to oversee the project

Seychelles basketball joins the Fiba Connected Stadium

From now on, the Victoria Gymnasium, home of local basketball, has been transformed into a Fédération internationale de basketball Connected Stadium, offering automated video production for live streaming purposes, joining over more than 50 leagues across the globe

The Fédération internationale de basketball (Fiba) Connected Stadium is a joint initiative between Fiba and Synergy Sports, and it has been designed to support national federations members and leagues by providing access to innovative computer vision-driven technology to help live stream games, enhance the fan experience with graphic overlays and commentary, attract new audiences, and therefore maximise the value of their content.

The Fiba Connected Stadium is a permanently installed camera system that uses Keemotion’s automated motion-based artificial-intelligence technology to capture video at close to 6K and output in 1080p full HD video. Pioneered for basketball, the technology captures professional quality video without any human intervention, ready to be enhanced with commentary and graphics.

It can be integrated to an in-venue commentary system and scoreboard and captures ambient sound, while the installed technology is extensible, enabling clubs to add additional fixed or mobile camera operators to produce a full four-angle production.

As part of this programme, the Seychelles Basketball Federation (SBF) will retain the commercial rights to the content, enabling it to sell the content to local television networks or OTT platform.

The Fiba Connected Stadium is a landmark partnership between Synergy Sports and Fiba designed to support Fiba-affiliated national federations and competitions, while the partnership puts game-changing technologies within the reach of basketball at every level.

A programme recipient, the SBF was entitled to an installation manager and support team during the setting up phase, but it was local basketball enthusiast and information technology specialist Biko Biong who also sits on the SBF’s executive committee who has the responsibility to oversee the work.

“It was thrilling to work on the Fiba Connected Stadium project, as it combines both passions of mine which are basketball and information technology,” Biong told Sports NATION.

He said with the full support of the SBF executive committee, they have successfully completed the two critical phases of the project which are assessment installation.

“The quality assurance and training phase will also be happening soon, so the SBF is seeking an ISP partnership to meet some dedicated bandwidth requirements,” he added.

On behalf of the SBF, Mr Biong extended special thanks to the Synergy Sports engineers, Hardware Solutions’ Elvis Adrienne who helped with the Installations and Cliff Malow of the Electram Services who helped to acquire some critical technical components to get this project up and running.

It is to note that Mali became the first African country to adopt the Fiba Connected Stadium in January 2021.

Roland Duval