Protege, the trusted source of data for AI development, today announced a new partnership with the Austrian Ski Federation (ÖSV) to license a high-quality library of winter sports audiovisual content for responsible AI use.

Through this collaboration, Protege will make available a rich catalogue of authentic, high-resolution video capturing skiing and snowboarding in real-world competitive and training environments. The archive spans a wide range of winter sports scenarios, from dynamic action sequences on snow to varied lighting, weather, terrain, and camera angles.

Accurately rendering winter activities such as sports presents unique technical challenges and opportunities for AI teams: fast motion, extreme environments, rapid camera movement, complex backgrounds, changing visibility, unique weather conditions, and high-contrast scenes. Yet demonstrating anatomically accurate and physics-adhering video is important for any video model seeking to create content.

This premium content enables AI teams to work with video that reflects the true complexity of the sport and how it interacts with rich environments. This is especially important for ongoing development of multi-modal and video models. This type of content has historically not been readily available for AI training use, and publicly available content has been used or lacks the high quality necessary. 

Protege is excited to provide secure and rights-adhering access to the Austrian Ski Federation’s exclusive and high quality content.

Christian Scherer, CEO of the Austrian Ski Federation, said: "We want to break new ground in winter sports in the field of artificial intelligence and enable responsible AI development while protecting the rights of the creators. Audiovisual data from our archive will be used to provide customized artificial intelligence models in the future. The collaboration with Protege is intended to simplify usage and increase productivity and quality at work. The most important thing for us is the compliance with the highest standards of security and data protection."

As AI becomes increasingly important across the sports ecosystem, spanning media operations, fan experiences, analytics, and production, rights holders are looking for practical ways to enable innovation without compromising IP, security, or compliance. This partnership reflects a shared commitment to making premium sports archives usable for AI teams in a structured, legally compliant way.

“We are excited to partner with the Austrian Ski Federation to help AI teams work with authentic winter sports video in a secure and compliant environment,” said Xenia Shevnina, Protege’s Head of EMEA Media Licensing. “This archive offers exceptional quality and realism, which is exactly what teams need for developing and evaluating AI video models and systems.’”

About the Austrian Ski Federation

The Austrian Ski Federation, based in Innsbruck is the country’s most successful sports association and rights holder of high-quality video content in various areas of winter sports. Its diverse program catalog includes audiovisual content from the fields of Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing and Snowboarding. This gives AI teams unique access to authentic content from this sports environment. By licensing the AI training rights, the ÖSV enables Protege to sublicense this content in a secure and legally compliant environment.

About Protege

Protege is the trusted source for finding and sharing AI training and evaluation data, enabling seamless and compliant data exchange. By empowering data holders and connecting them with AI developers with clear licensing terms and protections, Protege supports ethical AI development.

Protege’s scientific and strategic approach allows AI teams to quickly discover and license a wide array of curated datasets across industries, expediting the time to obtain AI-ready data for model development. Drawing from a global network of media partners, Protege’s Media team curates, licenses, and prepares catalogues of film, television, and other long-form video, alongside scripts and related metadata. For model builders, this means faster access to AI-ready video and text data with clear licensing — from early experimentation through to production-scale training and evaluation.

To learn more about how your organization can unlock new revenue by ethically licensing your content for AI, fill out our partner information form or contact the Protege team at contact@withprotege.ai.