Pixellot will be streaming anywhere from 700 to 1,000 live regional basketball games as part of a new deal with FloSports. The two companies are collaborating on coverage for the Jr. NBA Global Championship.
Games taking place during the tournament will be autonomously produced using PIxellot’s artificial intelligence capabilities, and then streamed via FloHoops.com, the basketball hub of FloSports.
The Jr. NBA Global Championship is a youth basketball tournament for the top 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls across the world. As part of this deal, Pixellot developed a mobile version of its product that can be easily transported to different tournament locations. Previously, it has sold more permanent Pixellot robotic camera systems for sports arenas.
David Shapiro, the president of Pixellot’s U.S. youth division and head of U.S. sales, said this partnership with FloSports will help to democratize amateur sports production. Earlier this year, Pixellot also extended a partnership with the National Federation of State High School Associations to stream live high school sporting events. Last summer, it teamed up with NBC Sports Group’s SportsEngine to enhance NBC’s coverage of youth sports programs.
“Sports production right now is really focused on the top tier events that have a big audience,” Shapiro said. “You need money to produce those games, so most of youth sports and lower level college sports are forgotten about, while women’s sports aren’t focused on. As our production becomes more mainstream it brings the ability to produce a lot more games downstream because it costs so minimal compared with typical production. You don’t need as big an audience.”
Pixellot works with schools, clubs, leagues, and federations worldwide and streams more than 40,000 hours of live sports per month. Live and on-demand coverage of the Jr. NBA games will be accessible on FloHoops.com to FloSports Pro subscribers.
Pixellot’s system is also used by professional teams, with its robotic cameras installed at the practice facilities of leading soccer clubs such as FC Barcelona and FC Bayern Munich. But the company sees significant potential in exposure at the youth level. Shapiro pointed to, as an example, the year 2002 when ESPN aired a high school basketball game featuring then-burgeoning star LeBron James. That broadcast exposed James to a national stage at a young age and jump started his professional career.
“As LeBron became a phenom, they wanted to discover the next phenom, and now it’s trickling down to youth sports,” he said. “There’s a big audience: a lot of smaller audiences across a large number of events. In youth sports, there’s 40 million kids in the U.S. playing. More kids playing sports are going to have an opportunity to participate in a game that’s professionally produced.”