WSC Sports signed a new deal today with Bleacher Report, which will use WSC’s machine-learning platform to automatically publish highlight videos from UEFA European football games online.
Bleacher Report, a division of Turner Sports, already uses WSC’s platform for generating shortform video highlight reels for college basketball and football (including March Madness) and National Basketball Association (NBA) games.
Instead of relying on an editor to select and assemble significant moments from recent matches, WSC Sports technology uses AI techniques to analyze video content, commentators’ analyses and audience response in real time to find key plays from a given sporting event and assemble them for consumption — and, of course, monetization. The technology also offers personalization, allowing the use of metadata to create customized clip reels featuring the players, or types of plays, that are of the most interest to individual viewers.
“Bleacher Report is constantly working to bring fans closer to the games and sports they love,” said Bleacher Report VP of Programming Bennett Spector in a prepared statement. “WSC Sports’ platform enables us to create customized highlights of every key moment for UEFA fans in real time. Based on the success we’ve seen with pro and college sports, we are excited to bring the same technology to world football fans in the same short-form format we know they love.”
It’s not a small business, either. WSC says it covers 10 different sports on five continents thanks to deals with media rights owners including the NBA, MLS, PGA, USL, World Surfing League, FIBA, and Cricket Australia. According to a recent Sport Techie report, WSC created more than 300,000 NBA videos during the 2016-2017 season, generating more than seven billion views on the NBA’s Facebook page alone.
