PokerGO
The combination of high stakes and uncertainty involved in poker gives it a unique attraction as a sport. Poker fans are passionate about the game, each with their own stories of legendary players and lucky hands of cards. When they want high-quality live Poker content, they subscribe to PokerGO, a service provided by Poker Central that offers 100 days of on-demand live content every year.
PokerGO manages 500 terabytes of content with iconik. When finishing up a new post-production facility, it brought in Colin Huse to be the Post Production Facilities Manager. Around the same time, iconik was also brought in to manage PokerGO’s growing media library.
Looking for Solutions When File-Sharing Folds
The decision to use iconik came about when the file-sharing tools used by PokerGO to share and send content became bulky and more limited as its needs for collaboration and storage grew. As online storage would fill up, team members would feel anxious about managing existing content to make room for new content that needed to be uploaded to the cloud.
Soon after starting with iconik, PokerGO was at the World Series of Poker where Colin and his team were adding around 10 terabytes of daily content to a local server, while learning along the way to use iconik to index it all in the cloud .
The elasticity that iconik offered for cloud resources enabled the team to get their local storage into the cloud with no storage limitations. Since that intense beginning at the Poker World Series, Colin has brought many new users into iconik with little need for follow up support.
“The fact that I can set our people up with a new tool and they can get started, without much assistance from me, just speaks to how intuitive iconik is.”
Fast Collaboration for Live Events
Tables can turn quickly in poker, and when they do, the ability to quickly share these dramatic moments with their community is vital to drive viewers into the live events in progress. The PokerGO team does this through quick collaborations between its marketing and media teams—nearly in real-time.
Live Events Workflow
Betting on AI For Better Media Management
PokerGO hopes to establish an archive filled with rich metadata that can make all their media easy to find. The team has already started to explore how using AI services in iconik can help with this goal. The ability to scan faces in media and tag them with player names is something Workflow Intelligence Nexus (WIN) has set up for PokerGO with AI facial recognition.
“If it doesn't require cognitive thought, a person should not be doing it. That’s our guiding principle for building workflow automation."
This could just be the start as there are many other ways to use AI in poker—like tagging the cards in a player’s hand! WIN plans to implement its workflow automation as a service platform for PokerGO so they are able to gain even more powerful AI workflows like object and emotion detection.
Staying Flexible Through COVID-19
When COVID-19 unexpectedly changed life and business for everyone, PokerGO remained agile. Broadcasting live events during a pandemic just isn’t possible, but with so much content already available, its team has continued to serve its customers new content from repurposed content in the form of highlight reels and documentaries.
Following the advice of their local Government, the entire PokerGO team works remotely as much as possible. Editors can still access the entire archive of content and edit with it in the iconik panel for Adobe.
What’s Next for PokerGO?
In the future, PokerGO hopes to use iconik to set up a visual database to serve as a pre-archive tool so its team can find content for its productions just by searching with a couple of known data points like a player name and a year.
As Colin and the PokerGO team continue to find new ways to use iconik and incorporate it with other services, the iconik team will be there to support them with new creative solutions.
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