HAND (Human & Digital) announced that it has created interoperable, ISO (International Organization of Standardization) -level Talent IDs for thousands of the most notable Major League Baseball (MLB) and National Football League (NFL) players. The addition is a continued extension of the HAND Talent ID database beyond Media & Entertainment talent.
The announcement comes in advance of the annual Sports Video Group (SVG) Summit and SPORTEL Talks events (Dec. 16-17, 2024) in NYC, where HAND will be presenting.
These quantifiably notable professional athletes, spanning the history of the MLB and NFL, join thousands of National Basketball Association (NBA) athletes already available and resolvable, like an IP (Internet Protocol) address, within the public HAND Talent ID registry database.
Designed for the ethical and reputational identification of talent and their connected digital replicas in the cultural industries of entertainment, sports, fashion, music, news, gaming, and more – HAND’s standard-based Digital Object Identifier (DOI) technology is available as both a unique, interoperable, persistent, “forever ID” talent registry and as a SaaS-based Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics platform, with an API and web UI subscription model.
“From advertising to gaming to virtual entertainment experiences, the value of talent utilization for highly visible pro sports figures has mushroomed, and with the NIL (name, image, likeness) licensing market in college sports projected to grow to $1.67 billion in 2024-2025, and potentially exceed $2.5 billion by 2025-2026, the need to accurately verify the identity of sports talent – both early and throughout their careers – has never been greater,” said Will Kreth, founder and CEO of HAND. “Weak verification schemes, dirty, outdated data, and fraudulent deepfakes are all real risks when licensing deals are on the line. As HAND’s interoperable public talent ID database adds verifiable MLB and NFL players to our existing NBA records, we know that standards-based identifiers to help automate player profile verification – at both the pro and college level – are essential.”
Like a “tracking beacon” for talent, HAND helps automate the identification, verification, provenance, and authenticity of talent-related assets in audio/visual works and virtual environments – across the modern media supply-chain.
By identifying “what is real vs. what is not” HAND also helps talent protect against unauthorized usages (deepfakes), while enabling more efficient licensing in the growing market of Name, Image, Likeness, & Voice (NILV) deals, maintaining integrity and version control of their authorized likenesses in monetizable content throughout its lifecycle.
HAND API and Beta partners include Sony Pictures Entertainment, AFI (American Film Institute), Fabric-Xytech, Respeecher, Nash Info / Opus Data/ The Numbers, BB Media, Simply.TV, Meta Martis, QUBE Cinema, The Scan Truck, Wild Capture, and MetaRex Media as organizations that have begun to test and deploy HAND’s Talent IDs.
“Industry standards, interoperable metadata, and network effects take time to catch on,” continued Kreth. “But we’ve done the research – listening to the workflow pain-points of metadata governance teams at film studios, TV networks, major talent agencies, player associations, payment processors, and actor’s unions. Every single one of them has been looking for a standards-based solution to global talent identity resolution. Because the HAND Talent ID is a first-class public resolvable ID for notable talent – its ubiquity and valuable utility in the media supply-chain is only possible by working with as many successful companies as possible – especially in the dynamic area of professional & college sports.”
