Video Highlight Prediction Using Audience Chat Reactions

Sports channel video portals offer an exciting domain for research on multimodal, multilingual analysis. We present methods addressing the problem of automatic video highlight prediction based on joint visual features and textual analysis of the real-world audience discourse with complex slang, in both English and traditional Chinese. We present a novel dataset based on League of Legends championships recorded from North American and Taiwanese Twitch.tv channels (will be released for further research), and demonstrate strong results on these using multimodal, character-level CNN-RNN model architectures.Comment: EMNLP 201

“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”: Building a Better Framework for Esports Governance

The popularity of “esports,” also known as “electronic sports” or competitive video gaming, has exploded in recent years and captured the attention of cord-cutting millennials—often to the detriment of sports such as basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. In the United States, the commercial dominance of such traditional sports stems from decades of regulatory support. Consequently, while esports regulation is likely to emulate many aspects of traditional sports governance, the esports industry is fraught with challenges that inhibit sophisticated ownership and capital investment. Domestic regulation is complicated by underlying intellectual property ownership and ancillary considerations such as fluctuations in a video game’s popularity. Since analogous reform is nigh impossible, nascent governance organizations have been created to support the professionalization of esports as a new entertainment form. As esports consumption continues to grow, enterprising stakeholders are presented with the unique opportunity to create regulatory bodies that will shape the esports industry. This Note analyzes how the professional sports industry and foreign esports markets have addressed governance challenges that arise from differences between traditional sports and competitive video gaming. It concludes by exploring two potential pathways for domestic esports governance. View PD

Narrative Bytes : Data-Driven Content Production in Esports

Esports - video games played competitively that are broadcast to large audiences - are a rapidly growing new form of mainstream entertainment. Esports borrow from traditional TV, but are a qualitatively different genre, due to the high flexibility of content capture and availability of detailed gameplay data. Indeed, in esports, there is access to both real-time and historical data about any action taken in the virtual world. This aspect motivates the research presented here, the question asked being: can the information buried deep in such data, unavailable to the human eye, be unlocked and used to improve the live broadcast compilations of the events? In this paper, we present a large-scale case study of a production tool called Echo, which we developed in close collaboration with leading industry stakeholders. Echo uses live and historic match data to detect extraordinary player performances in the popular esport Dota 2, and dynamically translates interesting data points into audience-facing graphics. Echo was deployed at one of the largest yearly Dota 2 tournaments, which was watched by 25 million people. An analysis of 40 hours of video, over 46,000 live chat messages, and feedback of 98 audience members showed that Echo measurably affected the range and quality of storytelling, increased audience engagement, and invoked rich emotional response among viewers

Appropriating Play: Examining Twitch.tv as a Commercial Platform

This thesis critically analyzes Twitch.tv, a gaming-oriented, online live-streaming site. Viewing the site as a ‘lean platform’ (Srnicek, 2017), it analyzes many aspects of Twitch’s business operations, including ownership structure, video game industry affiliations, use of data, and the monetization of user activity. This analysis then identifies three major areas of concern arising from these operations: the tendency toward monopolization in the gaming industry and its peripheral activities; the intensification of audience commodification; and, the tendency to turn professional streamers into precarious creative labourers. All of these implications point to a growing need for concerted labour organization. The goal of this thesis is to address gaps in the existing literature about Twitch and to provide a foundation for future critical inquiries into the site

Let’s Play: A Walkthrough of Quarter-Century-Old Copyright Precedent as Applied to Modern Video Games

Looking to the copyright protection over the audiovisual displays of video games, current precedent—created by extensive litigation in the 1980s over early arcade games—may be a round hole into which the square peg of today’s highly complex video games would have difficulty fitting. This is an issue that has increasing importance as the market for the passive consumption of video game audiovisual displays through tournament streams, walk-throughs, etc., continues to balloon. If courts were to apply precedent from litigation in the 1980s to video games as they exist today, the idea that copyright protection automatically attaches to any and all audiovisual displays generated by a game may not hold true. It is uncertain to what extent the reasoning in early arcade game litigation regarding the issues of authorship, the idea/expression dichotomy, and fixation would yield similar holdings. Moreover, it appears similarly uncertain to what extent a retreat from earlier precedent may impact publishers’ rights in downstream uses of audiovisual displays. Even if potential defendants prevailed under either an idea/expression dichotomy theory or a fixation theory—meaning the copyright does not attach to audiovisuals at the outset—later-fixed audiovisuals may still be protectable. The strongest argument potential defendants have, therefore, is that their interaction with the game precludes copyrightability for the audiovisual displays due to a lack of “original authorship” on the part of the publishers

Spartan Daily, February 14, 2018

Volume 150, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2018/1008/thumbnail.jp

Análisis de las Técnicas de Emisión y Realización para eSports

La finalidad de este trabajo fin de grado es definir y situar históricamente los eSports como género multimedia, exponer las ventajas y desventajas de las principales plataformas de streaming que emiten contenido relacionado con los eSports y observar en qué medida se está incrementando la presencia de los eSports en televisión. Del mismo modo, se han analizado las características y particularidades de la emisión y realización de un evento de eSports mediante un ejemplo aplicado. La presente investigación se estructura, principalmente en tres partes. La primera realiza un análisis de la evolución de los eSports, desde su origen hasta la actualidad. Para ello se ha realizado una revisión bibliográfica que ha incluido artículos científicos de revistas académicas y de prensa especializada. La segunda parte aborda los eSports desde una perspectiva técnica, especialmente desde el ámbito de la distribución del contenido, tanto en Internet como en medios tradicionales. Por último, la tercera parte consiste en un análisis aplicado de un evento de eSports, desde el punto de vista de la producción y realización audiovisual. La retransmisión de este contenido se ha realizado por streaming y por televisión convencional. Ambos aspectos se han examinado a lo largo de todo el trabajoThe purpose of this thesis is to define and historically place eSports as a multimedia genre, to present the advantages and disadvantages of the main streaming platforms that broadcast content related with eSports, and to observe in which manner the presence of eSports is increasing in television. In the same way, the main broadcasting and directing features and particularities of an event have been analyzed, using an applied example. The present research is structured in three sections. The first one conducts an analysis of the evolution of eSports, from its origin until today. For this purpose, a bibliographic review has been made, including scientific articles from academic magazines and specialized press. The second part address eSports from a technical perspective, especially from the content distribution field, both via the Internet and traditional media. Finally, the third part consists of an applied analysis of an eSports event, from the media production point of view. The event chosen has been broadcasted both via streaming and traditional television. Both distribution channels have been studied in this thesis.Climent Belda, X. (2016). Análisis de las Técnicas de Emisión y Realización para eSports. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/68377TFG

Spartan Daily, February 16, 2009

Volume 132, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10549/thumbnail.jp