Inter Milan had six hundred terabytes of history sitting in archives, servers and thumb drives. Every goal, every trophy lift, every face. None of it discoverable. Here's how that changed, and what comes next.
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Evolphin’s MAM is at the heart of our digital media transformation strategy. As we look for new and innovative ways to engage our sponsors and global fanbase, Evolphin has given us the tools and expertise to discover and utilize our extensive digital content library. For 113 years we have collected a rich history of images and videos which until recently remained hidden in archives, servers, and thumb drives. With the Evolphin AI toolset we have indexed, tagged and labelled a massive amount of historical and current content.
In 2020, FC Internazionale Milano had a problem: a vault of incredible history that nobody could open. 600 TB of match footage, player interviews, training sessions and academy tapes sat in scattered storage, growing every week, with no metadata connecting any of it to a player, a match or a moment, so producers spent hours scrubbing tape to find a single clip. With millions of global followers waiting on content, Inter Milan knew they had to open the archive.
Inter partnered with Evolphin to make 113 years of history finally useful. In under a month, 175,000 files and 21,000 hours of video were migrated onto one platform, 3,000 players and personnel were mapped by custom-trained face recognition, and eight stakeholder groups, from journalists to sales and marketing, were working in the same library for the first time. By the 19th Scudetto in 2021, Inter Media House was producing record content numbers off a modernized archive.
This is one club's journey with Evolphin, but it previews a horizon for the whole industry. Every team has an archive, and here's how Inter opened theirs.
Inter Milan had more than 600 Terabytes of digital archives that were growing each week with content from game day, player events and even training materials from the player academy. Providing stakeholders with near real-time premium content is the lifeblood of any digital transformation strategy. Content needed to be post-produced rapidly, and distributed to Inter TV, Inter Media House, the Inter website and of course, social media. Given the massive amount of content, homegrown tools and their legacy DAM - which often required manual steps - were obstructing the Inter creative teams and preventing them from truly exposing the exciting brand that is Inter Milan.
Inter Milan had more than 26 million social media followers across the globe at the time. They needed to implement a new digital experience platform that would deliver personalized content and would maintain 24/7 digital connectivity with its global fan base. This presented several challenges for Inter Media House because, with so much existing content, they needed the ability to quickly search for key moments in thousands of soccer games; focus on target demographics and create clips & images to satisfy their passionate fan base & loyal sponsors. Manually scrubbing through 40 years of videos and millions of images was not going to meet the challenge.
A lack of automation meant that much of the game day metadata collection was lost. The soccer metadata feed provides Inter Milan with instant access to descriptive information about its content, including commentary, player faces, logos of advertisers and sponsors. However, given poor metadata collection and in the absence of an automated workflow, journalists, sales teams and business owners looking for specific match/player/sponsor analytics were relegated to manual search that took countless hours and often proved unreliable.
Founded in 1908, Football Club Internazionale Milano, commonly known as Inter Milan outside of Italy, is a legendary Italian professional football club based in Milan. Inter is the only Italian club never to have been relegated from the top flight of Italian football.
Since its formation, the club has won 31 domestic trophies, including 19 league titles, 7 Coppa Italia titles, and 5 Supercoppa Italiana titles. From 2006 to 2010, the club won five successive league titles, equalling the record at that time. They have won the Champions League three times: two back-to-back in 1964 and 1965 and then another in 2010. Their latest win completed an unprecedented Italian seasonal treble, with Inter winning the Coppa Italia and the Scudetto the same year. The club has also won three UEFA Cups, two Intercontinental Cups and one FIFA Club World Cup.
At the very beginning, Evolphin crawled every storage system Inter used, from on-premises servers to cloud buckets, to hard drives scattered across teams. Working alongside the Inter team, we set rules for what to migrate, what to correct (filenames) and what to delete. Content was check-summed and in the case of duplicate files, zero byte smart copies were created so that content was never lost. Low resolution proxies were created for video content, an important process to support the video proxy management workflow. All content was indexed on ingest. Those rules became the automated ingest rules, driving the import of 21,000 hours of video footage from NAS volumes, S3 locations, and legacy MAM systems. The end to end process was completed within one month.
The end result was a single search pane that would locate content no matter where it is stored or located.
With Evolphin X, customers can take advantage of BYOS (Bring Your Own Storage) which means that content is indexed no matter where it is stored but still managed by the MAM. This delivers on the goal of securely indexing and managing content no matter where it is stored or located. This approach eases the migration burden, protects the installed capital base, and drastically reduces operational costs.
Evolphin's timecode metadata, called data timelines, worked alongside Inter Milan's existing match metadata to create a system where exact moments were discoverable by any employee or partner without knowing which keyword or phrase someone had used to index the content. Evolphin's AI generated the first layer, with speech to text in Italian, logo detection for Inter's sponsors and advertisers, and facial recognition custom-trained on 3,000 players and key personnel. In addition, the timecoded feeds Inter received from sports data platforms were applied automatically to the match footage arriving by satellite at Appiano using Evolphin's REST API.
The two layers of metadata working in tandem drastically improve the search experience. An editor at Inter TV can go straight to a specific player's goals in a specific match and pull them into a Premiere sequence, and because the timelines drive automatic clipping, journalists and sales teams can find and cut sponsor logo footage themselves without an editor ever touching the request.
"Going in we were impressed with the AI Data Timeline features. But being able to hook up game metadata feeds using Evolphin's REST API, took it to another level. We can now pinpoint any moment in the match at the touch of a button. Our editors and journalists save hours everyday with the powerful search enabled by these very cool data timelines."
Davide Pimpinella
IT Analyst, Inter Milan
Evolphin X extends search capabilities into simple natural language. A journalist asking ‘show me the goal scored by Martinez at San Siro last Saturday’ simply asks for it using that very statement and gets the exact clip returned. No knowledge of how the archive is structured, no metadata literacy, no dependency on whoever happened to tag it.
Evolphin implemented an on-premises hub at Appiano Gentile to account for poor internet connectivity and to facilitate collaboration among teams using Evolphin Collections. The dual mechanism enabled real-time review and approval for each of the primary stakeholders. The Appiano solution was developed between Evolphin and stakeholders from eight different groups, Inter TV, Inter Media House, Inter Photo, Inter IT Broadcast, journalists, graphics, animation, and sales and marketing. The solution mapped to each stakeholder’s unique set of requirements, complementing how they worked and not requiring wholesale changes to existing workflows. For the editorial side, that meant the archive coming to them through Adobe CC plugins in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Premiere, where they could search and link assets, start jobs from prebuilt project templates, and receive real time producer comments and feedback in the application they were already familiar with. Sneaker-net was replaced as were USB drives passing between desks, email threads,Dropbox links, and even word of mouth!
Evolphin X Portals take this well beyond Appiano and the Inter team. A Portal extends distribution so every sponsor, regional broadcaster and player's own brand team logs into a controlled space and pulls pre-approved, brand-compliant, rights-cleared, co-branded content for themselves, within the parameters the club sets, with no IT ticket and no one in ‘Creative’ fielding the request.
Reclaiming 40% of a 600 terabyte footprint massively reduced storage costs. Running review and approval on-premises with Collections removed several third-party proofing subscriptions Inter would otherwise be renewing every year.
Sports organisations produce vast media volumes daily but routinely fail to exploit what they already own. Inter’s centralized MAM with structured metadata transformed the archive from a storage cost into a retrievable commercial library.
The engagement window on a highlight or press conference clip is measured in minutes, not hours. Editors can clip and distribute more effectively. In the future, using LLM, Evolphin X will handle the editorial overhead with automatic transcription, captioning, and multilingual adaptation. Structured metadata will route the right asset to the right recipient automatically, eliminating the manual handoffs that cost time and miss the moment.
Sponsors pay for visibility and association, but most sports organisations cannot prove or package that value at scale. Inter Milan can now make sponsor presence queryable across the entire content library. AI metadata has enabled accurate reporting for every piece of content featuring a sponsor placement, by match, by channel, by audience.
Inter Milan invested in structured metadata as part of the initial migration process, and as a result, secured compounding returns from every AI capability later introduced.
The centralized MAM with its structured metadata allowed Inter to automatically serve different content to different audiences including international fans, season ticket holders, youth segments, based on rules set once by the editorial team.
Inter won the 19th Scudetto in their history and the content produced by #InterMediaHouse achieved record-setting numbers.
"Soccer has a rich history. Inter itself is 113 years old. We know how to play our soccer, but implementing sophisticated AI driven MAM workflows is a different ball game. Evolphin impressed us with their hands-on approach. Their executive team understood our challenges and was focused on our needs. Their best practice recommendations helped us avoid many pitfalls that could have derailed the project. A true partner in every sense of the word for our digital transformation and our 28 million digital followers across the world are now seeing the benefits."
Alessandro Travaglia
IT Manager Digital, Inter Milan
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This was Inter Milan's journey to consolidating their assets and making them searchable and usable. These workflows and challenges are common across sport. Whether you're a large club, a league or a local little league, you will have years if not decades of matches, training sessions, player media and academy footage sitting somewhere. Finding the right moments for the right edits, for sponsors, for advertisers and for the fans - that's when a media asset management software comes into play.
What Evolphin can do for you:
And Evolphin X takes it further: