From EIC Accelerator Grant to Local TV: CINFO's AI Sports Cameras

Most amateur and semi-professional matches in Europe are never filmed, because a conventional outside broadcast costs more than a small club earns. CINFO, a software company in A Coruña, set out to replace the camera crew and the director with software. Its system, tiivii, steers robotic cameras with artificial intelligence, cuts between them in the cloud and pushes the result to its own streaming apps. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's January 2020 cut-off, the European Commission selected CINFO for blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, for the project TiiVii. The list names CINFO as the only beneficiary of the project.

According to CORDIS, the grant was €1,781,500 towards a total cost of €2,545,000, and the project ran from 1 May 2020 to 31 July 2022. CINFO itself announced a larger figure in March 2020: €6.03 million of support, €3.9 million of it "as direct capital investment by the new EIC Fund", for roughly 20% of the company, "pending procedures". Six years later the grant is on record and the platform exists. The equity is not.

What CINFO Does Now

CINFO is active. The Spanish commercial register gazette, BORME, recorded a board change on 8 October 2025, and in March 2025 it recorded CINFO as the sole shareholder and sole administrator of another A Coruña company, Ivory Soluciones SL. What Ivory does and what CINFO paid for it are not public. The business register summary on Empresia lists the company as active, with accounts filed up to 2024 and annual sales above €2.5 million.

In February 2026 Rodríguez del Corral told La Opinión A Coruña that CINFO closed 2025 with €7 million of revenue and 100 employees, and expected €8.5 million in 2026. The same article describes a company that is wider than sports video: it builds interfaces and metadata systems for television operators, works for Spain's public broadcaster, and is pushing AI agents for small businesses. tiivii is one product line among several.

That sports line now runs its own channel. In June 2024 CINFO and the Galician football federation announced a Galician sports television for the 2024-25 season, starting with 51 football pitches, 53 indoor venues and 123 clubs. In March 2026 CINFO said its platform, tiivii.tv, broadcasts 750 sporting events every weekend across ten Spanish regions, with more than 50,000 live viewers a weekend. La Opinión A Coruña gives a smaller figure, about 250 matches a weekend in Galicia, with the system copied in Asturias and in national hockey competitions. The two numbers may count different things; neither has been independently audited.

The Technology: A Production Crew Made of Software

A televised match needs camera operators who follow play and a director who chooses which camera goes on air. Cheaper rivals usually replace both with one wide fixed camera, or stitch several fixed cameras into a panorama and crop it. The TiiVii objective on CORDIS argues that a stitched stream "does not show 100% of what actually happens in the game" and does not meet broadcast quality.

CINFO's answer is what it calls a triple AI stack. According to the final project report, one AI, "AI CamOp", drives pan-tilt-zoom cameras like a camera operator; a second, "AI MixerOp", decides which camera to put on air; and a cloud mixer, which humans can also operate, assembles the programme with graphics, scoreboards and advertising. The report says the AI detectors were ready for handball, basketball, water polo, volleyball, football, hockey, swimming and hornussen, a Swiss team sport. The company claims production costs fall by 90%; CORDIS repeats the claim in its results summary, but no independent cost study has been published.

The 5G part of the project was shown in public. In September 2020 Telefónica announced that tiivii ran eight cameras over a dedicated 5G network and an edge computing centre at Deportivo de La Coruña's Abanca-Riazor stadium, built with Ericsson. In July 2021 Panorama Audiovisual reported the system going into five municipal sports centres in A Coruña, which the city's sports councillor described as a test before a wider rollout.

What TiiVii Promised, and What the Record Shows

The CORDIS objective commits to three things: the triple AI stack, support for 8K cameras, and 5G interoperability, validated in business and consumer trials. The final report, covering the project to 31 July 2022, lists the AI operator and mixer, the cloud and 5G mixers, an orchestration system, a coaching tool, and an OTT platform with an interactive player and a content system for federations. On 8K it is more modest: CINFO "prototyped with several 8K models" and received an 8K four-sensor camera in April 2021 that it was "integrating". It also dropped a goal: "the market have shown us that our future is not in a low quality video portable version".

CINFO's own announcements in March 2020 and September 2020 went further: expansion to "at least 9 countries", 14,000 sports facilities, 25 new AI jobs and up to 100 jobs in three years. In December 2022 the company said tiivii had produced more than 1,500 events that year and projected 5,000 in 2023; CORDIS's summary cites 250 events a month by October 2022. No 2023 total was published. The announcements since then describe growth inside Spain; no presence in nine countries has been announced.

1. Triple AI stack for automated productionDeliveredAI CamOp, AI MixerOp and cloud mixer listed as complete in the final report; in commercial use since.
2. 5G interoperabilityDeliveredLive productions on Telefónica's 5G edge at Abanca-Riazor, per Telefónica.
3. B2B and B2C trials, OTT platformDeliveredMunicipal venues in 2021; tiivii.tv launched for the 2024-25 season.
4. 8K camera supportPartialPrototypes and one 8K camera being integrated at the end of the project.
5. Expansion to at least 9 countries, 14,000 facilitiesNot achievedNo such rollout announced; 2026 figures cover ten Spanish regions.
6. 5,000 events in 2023Not achievedNo 2023 total published; later weekly figures date from 2026.
7. 25 new AI jobsDelivered20 hires announced in September 2020; 100 staff in 2025 per the company, though a register summary shows about 10.
8. €3.9M EIC Fund equityNot achievedNot on the EIC Fund portfolio list; no capital increase in BORME since 2017.

The project ended on 31 July 2022, 27 months after it started; CINFO had described it in September 2020 as 24 months plus a 12-month extension, so it closed within that window.

The Missing Equity

The EIC Fund publishes a list of the companies it has invested in. Its portfolio pages, checked page by page in October 2026, hold 326 entries; CINFO and tiivii are not among them. An equity stake of about 20% in a Spanish limited company would normally require a capital increase entered in the commercial register. The BORME entries for CINFO summarised by Empresia from November 2017 to October 2025 include none, and both Empresia and Infonif give the share capital as €250,250. CINFO's recent statements, including the February 2026 interview, do not mention the EIC Fund as a shareholder. Whether the investment was declined, cancelled or replaced is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

The European Commission's Media and Audiovisual Action Plan of 2020 aims to "help maintain European cultural and technological autonomy" in media and to keep European audiovisual companies competitive. Automated production and the distribution platforms behind it are mostly sold by large non-European technology suppliers; a regional company that owns its AI, its cloud mixer and its streaming apps is the kind of supplier that plan wants. tiivii's use case also serves local clubs and federations that, in CINFO's framing on CORDIS, lose sponsors to premium sport because no one films them.

The Verdict

CINFO has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.