Eleven Sports and MEDIAPRO join forces on a series of strategic international projects to support the growth of both groups worldwide. The Belgian Pro League is one of the first projects falling under the auspices of their collaboration. Eleven Sports and MEDIAPRO will cooperate for the delivery of the Belgian Pro League project, including the launch of the 3 Belgian Pro League channels, the production of games and the international sale of Belgian football media rights.

Eleven Sports is an international group of sports television channels with platforms across Europe and Asia. In Belgium, Eleven has the rights for LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the UEFA Nations League and the Euro and World Cup qualifiers, among other competitions. Eleven Sports Belgium recently secured the media rights of Belgian football for the next five seasons.

MEDIAPRO is an international multimedia company. It is a global player in film and TV production, as well as a key operator in sport, as a rights holder and producer. MEDIAPRO is, among other competitions, the holder of the international rights for LaLiga and provides the live capturing of the games from 16 different competitions, including LaLiga. As of next season, MEDIAPRO will also produce the live coverage of the French Ligue 1 and will launch in August the new Telefoot channel.

International strategic collaboration

With the sports media industry heavily impacted by Covid over the past few months, Eleven Sports and MEDIAPRO will be looking to pull together their expertise and capabilities across the world to boost business growth for both groups and deliver for fans. To kick off the new collaboration, MEDIAPRO will collaborate with Eleven with the launch of its new Pro League channels, with the delivering of a state-of-the-art production of the 1A, 1B, Women Super League and the E-Pro League competitions for Belgian fans and the sale of the Pro League across the world.

MEDIAPRO will operate from Belgium and will hire local staff, as it has done in all territories where MEDIAPRO operates.

Luis Vicente, CEO Eleven Sports Group: “This cooperation with MEDIAPRO that we are starting today is part of our international strategy to strengthen, accelerate and further develop our business on a global scale. In a difficult time for the industry, building strong new partnerships will help us find stronger and innovative solutions to enhance and scale our offering and deliver for fans. We are delighted to amplify our own capabilities with a global player like MEDIAPRO and look forward to working together.”

Jaume Roures, CEO MEDIAPRO: “We know Eleven Sports for many years. We regularly work with them in other countries and we know that combining the knowledge and expertise of professionals from both groups can lead us to very interesting projects. Like this one, that we started with Belgian Pro League. We will highlight all our experience to give Belgian fans the best possible experience of the new football channel.”

The world-wide premiere of the new Woody Allen movie, “Rifkin’s Festival”, is to open, out of competition, the 68th edition of the festival on September 18th in the Kursaal Auditorium.

The film, produced by THE MEDIAPRO STUDIO, Gravier Productions and Wildside, was shot last summer in San Sebastian and other nearby towns. It tells the story of a married American couple who go to the San Sebastian Festival and get caught up in the magic of the event, the beauty and charm of the city and the fantasy of movies. She has an affair with a brilliant French movie director, and he falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who lives there.

This romantic comedy written and directed by Woody Allen stars Elena Anaya Anaya (“Wonder Woman”, “La piel que habito”), Louis Garrel (“J’accuse”, “L’homme fidèle”), Gina Gershon (“The Insider”), Sergi López (“A Perfect Day”, “Pan's Labyrinth”), Wallace Shawn (“Radio Days”, “Princess Bride”, “Marriage Story”), and Christoph Waltz (“Spectre”, “Carnage”, “Django Unchained” and “Inglourious Basterds”, films for which he landed two Oscars).

“Rifkin’s Festival” is the fourth collaboration between Mediapro and the director and screenwriter after the Spanish company produced “Midnight in Paris”, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, films which have earned two Oscar Awards, among many other recognitions and accolades. The film will be distributed in Spain by TriPictures, and The Mediapro Studio Distribution will look after its international sales.

PHOTO: Woody Allen and Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro during “Rifkin’s Festival” shooting (© 2019 THE MEDIAPRO STUDIO and Gravier Productions, Inc. Photography by Quim Vives)

“Caminantes”, the first original drama from Orange, produced in association with 100 Balas (THE MEDIAPRO STUDIO) exclusively for the company’s TV platform Orange TV, has announced its release date for the night of Friday 10th July in the late night slot airing the first two episodes in exclusive and then on Saturday 11th July when all eight twenty-minute episodes will be released together. The story narrates with breakneck pace what happened to a group of five young pilgrims who disappeared while walking the Camino de Santiago.

Written and created by José Antonio Pérez Ledo (“Órbita Laika”, “Estación Apolo”) and directed by Koldo Serra (“Money Heist”, “The Ministry of Time”, “70 Binladens”, “Guernica”), “Caminantes” approaches the terror genre with a suspenseful storyline, the principal narrative resource of which is the use of the found footage technique, where video found on the missing pilgrims smartphones is the common thread to try to discover what fate they have suffered.

To add greater realism to this technique, the entire section of the drama that reconstructs the story of the five missing protagonists was shot in 4K quality using the latest generation smartphones, more specifically two iPhone 11s and two iPhone 10 XSs, in which the parameters were manually configured using an application so they can be used as if they were professional cameras. In addition, several other common applications and filters among younger users were also applied to transform the friendly tale into a terrifying narrative.

The leading cast members of the series are the five young pilgrims who have disappeared, played here by Daniel Ibáñez (“The Fence”, “Los nuestros”), Alexandra Pino (“I Know Who you Are”), Carlos Suárez (“Money Heist”), Songa Park (“Down There”) and Lucas Miramón (“Billy Elliot, the Musical”). Other cast members include Eguzki Zubia (“Guernica”, “Common Wealth”), Pako Revueltas (“The Hunt: Monteperdido”, “70 Binladens”), Javier de Córdova (“The Neighbor”) and Guillermo de Córdova (“The Neighbor”).

Set in the part of the Camino de Santiago that crosses the Irati Forest in Navarra, "Caminantes" was filmed last fall at different locations in Bizkaia, including Gorbeia, the Munibe Palace, the Otzarreta beech forest and the Markina pilgrim hostel.

Plot

In August 2019, a group of five friends; two girls and three boys, disappear while walking Camino de Santiago. All trace of them is lost in the Selva de Irati forest, close to the French border. Two weeks after their disappearance, the police discover their smartphones buried in the middle of the hills, alongside their backpacks and several personal items. Using video footage, the five shot and recovered from their smartphones, detectives can finally reconstruct their 40-hour nightmare.

The MEDIAPRO Group has applied Artificial Intelligence for the first time to the generation of soccer highlights in AIProclips, a new tech platform that allows users to create soccer highlights in real time ("near-live") adapted to their specifications. Just by configuring the user's selection criteria, AIProclips automatically generates the highlights. The Group has always distinguished itself by applying innovation and technology to all its business lines, including audiovisual production of sporting events.

Over the last year, the Innovation department of the MEDIAPRO Group has developed the pioneering tool that seeks to apply all the advantages of Artificial Intelligence to generating soccer highlights, taking into account the specificities of each match and evaluating criteria that up until now only professional producers were capable of factoring in, such as the excitement around a particular play, or what it means to score a goal in the 89th minute. The user, whether it is a broadcaster, fan, media outlet or sponsor, only need to configure certain settings (best plays, performance of a certain player, type of move) so that AIProclips automatically generates the desired clip. For over a year, the MEDIAPRO innovation team has been developing and optimizing the platform, training a combination of three algorithms with the support of a team of AI experts at IBM, so that AIProclips can assess these more subjective aspects as well as marking the beginning and the end of the plays at the precise moment or to differentiate a simple goal when the score is 3-0 to a decisive goal in the last minute.

AIProclips complements the standard edition of highlights and opens the door to great potential for TV channels and the media to generate highlights which are tailored to their specific markets and audiences. Being a cloud platform, users connect from anywhere, anytime, even during the game itself. The platform works in real time ("near-live") analyzing and classifying all the plays in a match, taking around 7 minutes to process the content so that users can create customized highlights.

In this way, users can create highlights from a match, matchweek or even an entire season or complete competition, choosing according to their preferences: every play by a specific player ranked from most to least relevant; of a specific type of play (for example, all the fouls of the matchweek); or by nationality (only the plays of Argentine players), through different layers of artificial intelligence applied to this innovative and unique product.

Three algorithms

AIProclips receives the ingest of the matches in real time and applies three layers of algorithms to the content, adapted and worked by the Innovation department of the MEDIAPRO Group. The first layer of algorithms focuses on the analysis of the plays and the execution of the cut, deciding when each play begins and ends, applying logic and criteria specific to a soccer match. To do so, the company drew on the expertise collaboration of algorithms created by Thuzz, a North American company with a wealth of experience in sports image processing.

The second algorithmic layer, created with IBM Watson technology, provides a first relevance analysis based on players' gestures, the commentator's voice or ambient sound, while the third layer designed and developed by IBM using machine learning, adds the context of the match, and thanks to the training applied, to identify that a 0-1 result in the 89th minute is of far greater relevance than at the beginning of the first half, for example. These two layers have been trained and adapted by the MEDIAPRO audiovisual services team and IBM experts for exclusive use in AIProclips.

The first user of AIProclips will be LaLiga, a competition for which hundreds of games have been processed this season.

"Artificial intelligence offers us immense opportunity to optimize production processes, but it also opens the door for the development of a huge number of new products aimed at responding to the needs of the hyper segmentation of audiences and the design of customized solutions, such as AIProclips. At MEDIAPRO we are committed to innovation and we are sure of the need to continue incorporating new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and algorithmic development, combining these with the talent and wealth of experience of our experts to continue responding to an increasingly demanding market in terms of personalization and interactivity with content", assures María Carmen Fernández, head of Innovation and New Business for the MEDIAPRO Group.

"MEDIAPRO is a pioneer in the development of new business models based on leveraging data and artificial intelligence. We are delighted to have collaborated with MEDIAPRO on this project which allows us to create a service of great value for their clients and places it at the forefront of technological innovation in the entertainment and media industry", said Andrés Farreny, director of Telco and Media at IBM Global Business Services.

“DRAMA” recently launched on TV3 with the airing of the first two episodes on Monday June 29th. Produced by RTVE together with El Terrat (THE MEDIAPRO STUDIO), is a series with a feminine bias and which avoids the typical stereotypes setting out to show modern-day reality somewhere between comedy and drama.

“DRAMA” stars Elisabet Casanovas (“Merlí”, “Benvinguts a la família”), Artur Busquets (“Com si fos ahir”, “La Tribu”, “Barcelona nit d'hivern”) and Júlia Bonjoch (“Fassman”, “El dia de demà”). The series was created by Dani Amor, written by Dani Amor, Charlie Pee (“L’apocalipsi” de Catalunya Ràdio) and Oriol Pérez, and directed by Ginesta Guindal (“Heavies tendres”, “Vida perfecta”, “El veí”).

The season is made up of six 25-minute episodes. In addition to the trio of main characters, the cast also features Ignatius Farray, Àlex Maruny, Carla Linares, Iñaki Mur, Paula Jornet, Aimar Vega, Eduard Buch and Laura Weissmahr. The original score for the series was written by Paula Jornet (Pavvla), David Solans and Pau Calero.

“DRAMA” can be seen on TV3 with two episodes being shown every week after premiering on the Playz channel back in February as well as being selected for screening at the prestigious Series Mania Festival in Lille (France).

Plot

Africa’s life is that of a normal post adolescent, sharing a room in a shitty flat, she’s got a job she doesn’t like and her main objective is to get to the weekend and go out with friends and get drunk and forget about insignificant life. Africa has decided not to decide, but everything is about to change when she discovers that she’s pregnant but doesn’t know by whom. Using her off-beat humor, she discovers what happened when she got pregnant and how she’s going to have to start taking decisions to solve the DRAMA which is about to begin.

The Mediapro Argentina fleet of OB vans was recently called into service to provide broadcast coverage via live streaming, for an event in the lockdown in Buenos Aires. The first virtual party took place in the Niceto Club de Palermo, Buenos Aires.

One of the Mediapro Argentina OB vans provided broadcast services of the event filmed with 3 HD cameras and saw a host of famous DJ’s, singers, youtubers, influencers and musicians take part. "La Bresh at home ", the virtual version of “La Bresh”, a season of massive parties launched in 2016 highlighting diversity. The recent editions of the party have seen more than 450,000 people joining in dancing together from the comfort of their own homes, without breaking any lockdown rules in Argentina.