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Sky to Launch Live Who’s Who innovation for Royal Wedding

Sky collaborates with Amazon Web Services and AWS Partners GrayMeta and UI Centric to provide machine learning-enriched user experience

Portland(02 May 2018)

Ahead of the Royal Wedding on Saturday 19 May, Sky News will use pioneering cloud-based machine learning and media services to name guests as they enter the chapel, and enrich the video content with facts about the attendees.

Accessible in the Sky News app or via skynews.com, the ‘Royal Wedding: Who’s Who Live’ functionality is innovative in the way it uses machine learning to enhance the user experience of a live-streamed major news event. The additional information associated with the live video will go beyond subtitles to provide relevant facts about the guests.

To enable this unique experience and deliver this service at scale, Sky News is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and two AWS technology partners, GrayMeta and UI Centric. As guests make their way into St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, AWS will capture live video and send it to cloud-based AWS Elemental Media Services for multiscreen viewing optimisation. An on-demand video asset, including catch-up functionality, will also be generated. In parallel, Sky is combining the GrayMeta data analysis platform with the Amazon Rekognition video and image analysis service for real-time identification of guests and tagging with related information.

Finally, Sky News is using the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to unify the content for rapid distribution to viewers. UI Centric has designed and developed the front-end application and video player to enhance the experience and user interface accessed by Sky News viewers.

Video content from the application will also be made available on demand after the event.

David Gibbs, Director of Digital News and Sports Products said: “Sky continuously searches for ways to innovate and bring better coverage to its customers. This new functionality allows Royal Wedding viewers greater insight into one of the biggest live events of the year, wherever they are. We’re excited by the software’s potential and ability to give audiences new ways of consuming content”. 

On top of the ‘Royal Wedding: Who’s Who’ function, those watching on the go can enjoy all the live coverage as well as live blogs and bespoke video content on the Sky News app.

On TV, Sky News will be the only broadcaster to cover the Royal Wedding on 19 May exclusively live in Ultra-HD. 

The broadcast will be fronted by Kay Burley from special studio locations in Windsor covering everything from guest arrivals and the bride’s entrance to the couple’s nuptials in St. George’s Chapel at midday and the subsequent carriage procession. 

About Sky

Sky is Europe's leading entertainment company, serving 23 million customers across seven countries - UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. The company had annual reported revenues of £12.9 billion in 2016/17, and is Europe’s leading investor in television content with an annual programming spend of around £7 billion.

From exclusive partnerships with HBO, Showtime and Warner Bros. to Sky Original Productions, Sky offers the best and broadest range of content along with the best viewing experience to suit each and every customer. Whether that’s through the multi-award winning next generation box, Sky Q, or Sky’s contract-free online streaming service, NOW TV, customers have access to the latest movies, drama, sports and kids’ entertainment wherever and whenever they like. This is all supported by Sky’s best in class customer service.

Sky’s success is not just based on what the company does but how it does it. Three new major commitments have been launched for Sky’s corporate campaign Sky Ocean Rescue; the reduction of our own single-use plastics by 2020; an investment fund of £25 million over five years in technology solutions; and support of marine protected areas across our markets.

Sky has over 31,000 employees and is listed as one of The Times Top 50 employers for women, as well as being recognised in the Stonewall list of Top 50 LGBT-inclusive employers. Sky is listed on the London Stock Exchange (SKY)

About GrayMeta

GrayMeta is a forward-thinking data company that powers automated metadata collection and represents a new way of extracting metadata across the enterprise. The GrayMeta Platform offers the freedom to extract, store, update and add intelligence to metadata which expands search-ability across more applications, turning information into valuable data. For more information, visit www.graymeta.com.

About UI Centric

UI Centric is a creative engineering business working to design and build ultra-high-quality user experiences and delivering memorable products and applications.

UI Centric was founded in 2008 in London. Our business has grown and transformed over the last ten years along with the tech sector, but we have always upheld our philosophy of developing around the user experience.

Today we have offices in London, New York and San Antonio. Working with some of the largest media & entertainment and Sports companies in North America and Europe.

We design and develop for a broad set of platforms including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Sony for devices such as Web, iOS, Android, PlayStation, Amazon Fire TV, Apple Tv, Android TV, Xbox, Roku, Connected TV, Wearables, AR, VR, as well as in car entertainment.

Our large in-house engineering team is capable of delivering end-to-end solutions on a variety of native technologies and frameworks. We have extensive experience with third-party integrations and build custom SDKs where necessary. Video steaming and metadata synchronisation is one of the most common engineering challenges we help tackle for our clients. We have extremely wide knowledge with common consumer broadcast integrations and have worked with most video players, advertising frameworks, streaming formats, DRM technologies and analytics in the market.