Cyberlink plays to sports fans

Cyberlink Corp. may have come up with the perfect software for busy sports fans around the world, an auto-editing program that turns sporting events into highlight shows as short as three minutes long.

So far, MagicSports 3.5 only works with three major sports -- soccer, baseball and Sumo wrestling -- but those choices show the company was thinking globally when it began developing the software. This is the second version of the software, with the first pitched to baseball fans. The next version, MagicSports 4.0, due out around late May or early June, may include American Football and tennis. The software engineering team in charge of the product has left it a mystery.

Baseball was a natural first target for the Taiwanese company because people on the island are crazy about the sport -- and a lot of them don't have time to stay up all night to watch national star and New York Yankees pitcher Chien-Ming Wang play.

So the answer on this high-tech island was to develop a software smart enough to pull highlights out of a game by monitoring several aspects of the field.

"The scoreboard is really the key in baseball because there's so much information up there," says Brian Lin, a product manager at Cyberlink.

The software can detect changes in the scoreboard to see when runs go up, when a hit is made, when a pitcher and batter go into a full count (three balls and two strikes), and other factors that might produce a highlight, such as crowd noise.

In soccer, MagicSports makes use of additional information, including activity near the goal. It can tell when there are a lot of players in front of the goal, and then gauges crowd noise to determine if it should clip the segment and put it in the highlight bin.

For Sumo wrestling fans, MagicSports is a godsend. The average match is three hours long, but much of that is pomp and ceremony tied to the long tradition of the sport. Once MagicSports removes all the excess fat, so to speak, the action of the entire match ends up only 20 minutes long.

The nicest feature for users is the amount of control they have over the editing process. Users can choose how much to condense the highlights of a game or match. A three-hour baseball game, for example, can be broken down to a 16-minute highlight film or a three minute clip. All commercials, of course, are removed. MagicSports also uses a four-star classification system to denote how important each individual highlight might be. Four stars means it's a must-see highlight.

Users can also go back and choose their own favorite moments of the game and create their own clip to share with friends. Does that raise any copyright issues? "We don't know," said Lin, but noted that a lot of users are already creating clips of their favorite sports moments and sharing them on the Internet at Web sites such as YouTube.

There are other conveniences built in. Have a backlog of old games you haven't had time to watch yet? No problem. Add them to your MagicSports library and the software will automatically sift through the games and create highlight films. You could watch a year of soccer highlights in a weekend.

Unfortunately, MagicSports doesn't work with Tivo, the popular TV show recorder, despite the fact Taiwan is one of the few places outside the U.S. where Tivos are sold. It would be a great feature.

The software only works on PCs right now, is Vista-capable and can be used on digital media centers designed around Intel Corp.'s Viiv technology, as well as Microsoft Corp.'s Media Center software and Cyberlink's own PowerCinema.

Currently, MagicSports is only sold as a download at Cyberlink's Web site. It costs $49.95, and the company has been allowing limited free upgrades. Users who bought MagicSports 3.0, for example, were allowed to upgrade to 3.5 for free. But the company isn't sure how many upgrades it will allow users, and said it hasn't decided how long it will continue to offer such free downloads.

So, serious sports fans might not want to wait.