Manchester City meets Crystal Palace on Saturday in this year’s FA Cup Final

One of the biggest days in English sports, the FA Final, takes place this weekend with perennial powerhouse Manchester City taking on Crystal Palace at Wembley Stadium in London on Saturday.

In anticipation of the match, take a look back at how the BBC transformed its FA Cup Final coverage a year ago using cutting-edge technology from Ross Video. BBC Sport’s Design Director John Murphy is joined by Ross Video’s Senior Business Development Manager, Sport and Live Events James Ransome to explore the impact of Spidercam, Voyager graphics for immersive visuals, PIERO for analysis and the Rocket Surgery team’s expertise in design, workflow, and data integration.

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This conversation was hosted at SVG Europe’s The Football Summit on March 20, 2025 at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester and is moderated by Charlie Fox, Marketing Manager EMEA at Ross Video.

SVG PLAY is your home for all Sports Video Group live-event and long-form video content. SVG members and sponsors have simple access to all SVG event panels, case studies, keynotes, and more — all in one place. To visit SVG PLAY, CLICK HERE.

By Michael Shepard, Mackenzie Hawkins and Ian King, Bloomberg

The Trump administration is clearing a path for two key Persian Gulf allies to pursue their artificial intelligence ambitions — and some of the biggest US tech companies are seizing on that opening with plans to spend billions of dollars in the region.

Center Moriches High School student Gavin Bailey recently earned the title of New York State champion in Marine Service Technology. A recent competition tested Gavin’s proficiency in working on boats and trailers, including his ability to diagnose and fix issues that may arise.

Gavin competed against other students at the New York State SkillsUSA Leadership and Skills Championships in Syracuse. There, he participated in individual skill stations and a written test. The hands-on portion included many aspects of two-stroke and four-stroke outboard, sterndrive, and inboard troubleshooting and repair. This required proficiency in marine electrical and ignition systems, fuel systems, cooling systems, lubrication systems, propulsion systems, and boat and trailer rigging and repair. The written test included these same topics, along with diagnostics, service, and repair of marine accessory items. Competitors were judged on safe work practices, cleanliness, organizational skills, accuracy, speed, and the completion of assigned tasks, worksheets, and paperwork.

“Gavin has proven himself as one of the most skilled technical marine servicers in the nation,” said Center Moriches High School Principal Marissa Mangogna. “This competition gave him the opportunity he rightfully deserves to show what he can do among the best of the best in the field.”

As state champion, Gavin has earned an invitation to compete at the SkillsUSA Championships this June in Atlanta, where he’ll test his skills against other top students from across the country.

For more information on the Center Moriches Union Free School District, visit the district’s website at cmschools.org. Happenings in the district can also be found on the district’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/cmschools.org/. #CMSchools

Athletes tend to be front and center in most brands’ sports campaigns. But how many pro athletes regularly use accounting software?

The answer is likely very few—with the exception of the ones who have also started their own businesses. That’s why QuickBooks, the Intuit-owned accounting software company, chose to focus on leaders from the business side of women’s sports in its “Power Moves” campaign, which is geared toward driving consideration among small-business owners, according to QuickBooks VP of Marketing Cathleen Ryan.

“QuickBooks will always try to tap into culturally relevant moments with authenticity, and nothing says that more than female sports right now,” Ryan told Marketing Brew.

The playbook

The “Power Moves” campaign consists of five videos focused on various women entrepreneurs in the sports industry talking about their businesses and how they use QuickBooks’s software. The episodes are about two minutes long and were shot at women’s sports bars around the country. The series debuted March 3 with an episode featuring Jax Diener, the owner of Watch Me! Sports Bar, and Tobin Heath and Christen Press, the USWNT icons who co-founded lifestyle brand and media company re—inc.

The episodes are being distributed across digital media company She Media’s platforms, which include websites like parenting outlet SheKnows and entertainment publication TVLine and which reach about 74 million unique viewers a month, according to She Media. QuickBooks is further amplifying the content with a media buy across The Gist, a sports media company whose founders, Jacie deHoop and Ellen Hyslop, are featured in the campaign.

The roster

Also spotlighted in the series are Allyson Felix, seven-time Olympic gold medalist and founder of women’s sports management firm Always Alpha; Jasmine Maietta, former pro basketball player and founder of sports lifestyle and apparel brand Round 21; Jenny Nguyen, CEO and founder of the women’s sports bar The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon; and Jen Barnes, founder and CEO of The Rough & Tumble sports bar in Seattle.

It’s a full slate of partners meant to represent various off-field aspects of the women’s sports industry, from media to merchandise, Ryan said. Even the production company behind the videos, Impakt Partners, is run by women, and the entire effort was spearheaded by Trailblazing Sports Group, the women’s sports commercial partnership firm founded by former ESPN ad sales exec Sara Gotfredson, who said she was tapped for the project by QuickBooks’s media agency, Initiative.

“We look for partners that are authentic, that share our values, [and] that have reach and an engaging platform,” Ryan said. “One thing that we really wanted to do with this QuickBooks ‘Power Moves’ campaign is try to embrace the entire women’s sports ecosystem.”

Though the women who star in the videos come from different sectors of sports, they all have one thing in common: They all “live and die in QuickBooks,” Gotfredson said.

The goal

In addition to expanding Intuit’s efforts across women’s sports, which included a March Madness campaign with Paige Bueckers this year, Ryan said the campaign is meant to frame QuickBooks as a tool for athletes turned founders, as well as create a “long-term connection” between the brand and entrepreneurs.

Even though the women who lead the sports industry off the courts and the fields don’t always find themselves in the spotlight, deHoop said The Gist’s audience has reacted positively to campaign content like behind-the-scenes videos promoting the company’s episode.

“My ethos in general has been [that] we should center the athletes in what we’re doing, so it’s just not something that I thought people would be very interested in, but it’s been really cool to see that that’s not the case,” deHoop said.

Ally Davis and Melissa Forman, co-founders of Impakt Partners, don’t work exclusively on branded content around women’s sports, so they were focused on creating an “integration that is seamless” in order to keep viewers interested, Forman said.

“When you do branded content, it can be really tricky, and it can sometimes turn people off,” Davis said. “But in women’s sports…the fans are so looking for this type of content, any content about women’s sports, they actually are appreciative of the brands that are stepping into the space.”

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaks while holding a new chip called the Gaudi 3 during an event called AI Everywhere in New York on Dec. 14, 2023. (AP file photo)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Before “America First” became the Trump administration’s mandate for foreign policy and trade, one sector was already working to bring business back to the United States: the semiconductor industry.

Aided by government incentives, American and foreign tech companies alike have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to bolstering semiconductor operations — research and development, manufacturing and facility modernization — across the country in recent years.

In few places is the growth of the U.S. semiconductor industry clearer than in the Greater Sacramento region, where tech leaders and lawmakers have, for years, sought to grow California’s role in producing the chips that power everyday necessities like cars, refrigerators and smartphones. Semiconductor giants clustered in cities just outside Silicon Valley — Intel, AMD, Bosch, Samsung and Micron — are building on a tech foothold Intel first established when it opened its Sacramento-County campus in 1984.

But President Donald Trump’s economic policies have complicated that growth as the administration takes its next steps toward imposing more tariffs on key imports and launching investigations into imports of computer chips and chip-making equipment — all at a time when deeper semiconductor investments were just starting to have a positive impact on changing supply chains. New tariffs, paired with the administration’s threats against the CHIPS and Science Act, could dramatically slow its goal of ensuring the U.S. maintains a competitive edge in artificial intelligence development.

“You’re starting to see some of it now. Samsung announced a delay in the fabs in Texas,” said Mario Morales, an analyst with the International Data Corp. “That facility was supposed to come online in 2024 now it’s being delayed to 2028. I think some of these companies are delaying it because they now know that they’re not going to likely get funding, or because of the uncertainty around the acts that we’re seeing around the new trade policy.”

Although the U.S. is a major producer of certain types of semiconductor chips, the nation’s share of global chip production — measured by volume and not dollar value — fell from 37% in 1990 to just 10% in 2022, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. As a result, the country relies heavily on imports from Taiwan and South Korea for advanced chips.

Major manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. are investing to build up U.S. facilities, partly due to incentives put in place during former President Joe Biden’s time in office. The CHIPS Act, a law passed in 2022 with bipartisan support, was designed to revive U.S. semiconductor manufacturing while sharpening the U.S. edge in military technology and minimizing future supply chain disruptions.

Because of the CHIPS Act, the U.S. is projected to more than triple its semiconductor manufacturing capacity — the highest rate of growth in the world during that period, according to a May 2024 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Boston Consulting Group.

Barry Broome, president of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, said weaknesses in the semiconductor supply chain became evident during the pandemic, when the U.S. experienced a shortage in supply. It was “abundantly clear that having these chip products offshore in Vietnam, Taiwan, China for cost savings had serious implications.”

Those pandemic-era challenges, paired with looming tensions between China and Taiwan, have helped drive the industry to the Sacramento area, he said. Northern California’s wealth of tech knowledge and established roots in the semiconductor industry are also attractive traits that have brought investment to the Sacramento region as federal subsidies begin to bolster domestic growth.

German tech company Bosch, for example, announced a $1.9 billion investment in the Greater Sacramento area in 2023 to manufacture chips for electric vehicles, converting its facility in Roseville into a silicon carbide semiconductor production site.

That investment, Bosch said, would create as many as 1,700 jobs in construction, manufacturing, engineering, and research and development. The project marks the largest semiconductor investment in California in three decades, according to Broome.

Tech workers who started out at companies like Intel have spun out companies of their own, including Sacramento-area AI startup Blaize and data storage manufacturer Solidigm.

Dinakar Munagala, cofounder of Blaize, said the company’s AI chips are among the few built domestically. Their chips are made in a Samsung foundry in Texas, he said. The company’s products, Munagala added, help to power systems that analyze traffic patterns and detect suspicious behavior in airports.

“We’re built here,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re actually getting quite a bit of interest from defense, border security, these classes of use cases.”

Lane Bess, board chair of Blaize, pointed to Munagala — who worked at Intel — as an example of the talent the Sacramento region can provide to tech companies. The area is primed to be a main corridor for the semiconductor industry because a lot of skilled workers are looking to develop their own companies, Bess said.

The Trump administration has viewed chip production as a national security issue because it would reduce U.S. reliance on importing chips that are also used by the military. It also intends to study the risks of having computer chip production concentrated in other places and the impact on U.S. competitiveness from foreign government subsidies, “foreign unfair trade practices and state-sponsored overcapacity.”

Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, said the fluidity of the state of administration’s tariffs will cause confusion about the impact on the supply chain “due to the complexity of tracking where materials and manufactured goods are produced and assembled.”

Video game companies, for example, have started to raise prices amid a backdrop of ongoing tariff uncertainty.

“For semiconductors, we may see certain goods no longer making sense to produce due to the cost — see Nintendo Switch 2 — and the value seen from IT purchases diminishing,” he said in an email.

Preorders for Nintendo’s highly anticipated Switch 2 were delayed in April as retailers assessed the potential impact of tariffs. Nintendo later confirmed that some Switch 2 accessories would see price adjustments, but maintained that its baseline price for the console — $449.99 — would remain the same.

Nguyen said that in the medium term, the growth of foundries around the world will be beneficial to easing dependence on Taiwan for chip production. Down the road, “we should see a healthier global ecosystem for semiconductor manufacturing and more supply chain options in where chips are produced and can be procured,” he said.

Broome, of the economic council, said he believes the Trump administration’s tariffs are aimed at restructuring global relationships. He said he hopes that “concludes quickly” because uncertainty over trade policy doesn’t favor the markets.

“If the tariffs are used for leverage to get better agreements in the next two or three months, then we’ll come back quickly, and will benefit from it,” Broome said. “If they’re considered long-term policy, I think it’ll really ice the capital markets from putting real money on the table.”