The SportTechie Awards highlight the teams, executives, sports technologies, venues, investors and leaders that most deserve recognition for their work in pushing our industry forward. To view all the 2018 categories and nominees, click here.
The media world pivoted to video years ago, and while that transition has been fraught with missteps for some publishers, the trend has turned everyone into a content producer. Leagues, teams, and even some athletes have their own studios and video production units. Traditional news outlets and broadcasters have ramped up their output to meet the growing demand across all social and traditional channels.
A remaining challenge, however, has been producing enough high quality content. And a growing number of entities in the sports world have turned for help to the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities of WSC Sports. The company’s technology analyzes live sports broadcasts in real-time and automates the production of short video clips for publication to any digital destination.
The Tel Aviv-based firm has grown from 13 employees to 70 over the past two years in order to help satisfy an expanding and impressive client list that includes the NBA league office, all 30 NBA teams, Turner Sports, MLS, the PGA Tour, the Stadium digital network, FIBA, Cricket Australia, the World Surf League, and the U.S Open tennis tournament. There are more partners that WSC Sports is unable to disclose, but according to the company, the complete set includes more sports leagues and clients on five continents.
This year, the NBA and MLS have detailed to SportTechie just how successful WSC’s work has been. The NBA received more than seven billion views of automated video clips on the league’s main Facebook landing page over the 2016-17 season. MLS said its digital metrics had been “off the charts” this past season, with WSC helping the league produce around 20,000 videos.
“What WSC has allowed us to do is actually create a custom content plan for every single destination that we have all over the world,” said NBA VP of emerging media Bob Carney. “That’s really the power they have. With such a global game and fans all over the world with an insatiable appetite for our content, that’s where they’ve really helped us.”
Both the NBA and MLS emphasized WSC’s capacity for feeding the appetite of the international fan by producing highlights of national favorites and sharing major storylines in the local language. WSC Sports’s platform can ingest every broadcast feed—national, regional, and multilingual options—to create targeted content.
WSC Sports initially started out as a scouting platform before pivoting to automated video. In fact, WSC stands for “World Scouting Center.” The company then envisioned a fan-facing product before working with the NBA on enterprise solutions. Then, during a pitch meeting with the league, WSC’s CEO, Daniel Shichman, made an offhand comment about being able to automate the video production process.
“This caught the NBA’s attention—elevating the solution from a consumer interface with cool features, to a complete workflow automation and mass personalization and scaling opportunity,” said WSC Sports cofounder and VP of business development, Aviv Arnon.
WSC Sports’s core technology indexes every play with metadata, tags details and descriptions, and finds the natural starting and stopping points for each clip. Plays receive a rating that takes into account video, audio, and social data. All a human operator then has to do is input a few filters—perhaps asking it to compile Steph Curry three-pointers to beat the buzzer—and a new clip is created.
“The system puts it together, spits out the video, and my writer just turned into a video editor,” said MLS Digital SVP and GM Chris Schlosser. “That’s been incredible, really empowering the whole content team to create video content based on what the storyline is.”
The NBA always was WSC Sports’ dream client—the company’s employees in Israel gather at their office to watch 4 a.m. local tip-offs of the NBA playoffs. Now, the league is its flagship partner.
“That was the dream,” Arnon said.
For being the underlying mechanism powering an increasingly large share of the modern fan experience, and for its growth and performance this year, we have selected WSC Sports as SportTechie’s Outstanding Sports Technology for 2018.