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Introduction

Annotations are a powerful concept in the Motto platform. In fact, we believe it is this concept that makes Motto shine when it comes to live sports OTT platforms. Annotations are representations of points in time in a video, and can be used to mark key moments in a match, like goals, fouls, or substitutions. These moments can be tagged through our visual Studio interface without any technical knowledge.
Motto recently released an AI agent in beta that can fully automate the process of annotating your live-stream!
By themselves, annotations are just empty containers; they do not “do” anything as such. However, they lay the fundament for two important concepts in Motto: actions and frontend plugins. In a nutshell, actions are automations that are triggered when an annotation is created, and frontend plugins are components that can be dropped into your OTT platform to enhance the user experience. For more information, please read our sections about actions and frontend plugins.

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Get Started

Before you can get started with creating annotations, a few supporting objects must be set up for your project. These are described below. Motto’s support team can set these up for you, so please reach out to get started.

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Annotation sets

An annotation set is a collection of the kinds of annotation types that you would like to create. Typically, you would create an annotation set for each sport that you are covering. For example, you might have an annotation set for football, and another for basketball. Each annotation set is associated with one or more event types. This ensures that your annotation set shows up for the correct events in the Studio interface (you would not want to accidentally tag basketball annotations on a football event!)

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Annotation types

Within each annotation set, there are one or more annotation types. Annotation types are the different kinds of annotations that you can create. For example, you might have an annotation type for goals, chances, corner kicks, red cards, kickoff, full-time, etc. Annotation types can be ordered and grouped together (e.g. “In-Game Moments”), which determines how they are displayed in the Studio interface.

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Annotations

Now that your annotation set and annotation types are in place, you can start creating annotations for your video content! Navigate to the Video Manager in the Studio, and select the event and video you would like to annotate. Click on the “Video tagging” tab. If your annotation set and annotation types have been set up, you should see something similar to this:
If you do not see the “Video tagging” tab in the Studio interface, this may mean that your annotation set has not been attached to your event type yet. Please refer to the annotation set section above, and reach out to Motto’s support team to have it attached.
When you click on one of the available annotation types, an annotation will be created at the current time in the video player on that page.

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Next Steps

Now that you know how to create annotations, you may want to learn more about actions, which allows you to automate your workflows during a live-stream or VOD!