The only real sporting event we’ll watch is the World Cup, and with last year’s tournament taking place in Japan and South Korea, we ended up catching all the games courtesy of TiVo. Rather than actually suffer through a full 90 minutes of soccer, we ended up watching a lot of the games on TiVo’s double-speed function, which believe it or not, would make the games a lot more exciting since they’d be so much more fast-paced.
Well, Ahmet Ekin, a researcher at the University of Rochester, completely one-upped our little time-saving trick and invented a software program called the Automatic Sports Video Analyzer that let him watch automatically generated summaries of each World Cup game that picked out all the exciting parts of the games and cut all the boring stuff. The Automatic Sports Video Analyzer can do the same thing for all sorts of sports like football, baseball, basketball, and tennis, keeping just the actual gameplay and eliminating everything else. Ekin even thinks you could conceivably watch two games at the same time, with the software automatically switching between games when the action dies down in one. Or you could do things like get a summary of a basketball game that only showed when one team scored points. We think this should absolutely be added to TiVo Series 3.
