WSC Sports approached the NBA in 2013. Until then, the company had gained only moderate traction as a video editor for scouts, but it was shifting to target media publishers. WSC’s four Israeli founders focused their pitch on technology that could analyze game video and identify the most important moments. In the course of the meeting with the NBA, WSC’s CEO, Daniel Shichman, made an offhand comment: “And we can automate all of it, too.”
The magic a-word caught the NBA’s attention. The league’s VP of emerging media, Bob Carney, said he had already fielded a number of pitches from other companies touting the ability to automate highlights but “nobody was able to really deliver at the scale that they had promised.”
The NBA provided WSC with video from all of that year’s G-League games as a test. WSC hadn’t intentionally emphasized the automation component of its product because that was still in development. Now they hurriedly honed its machine learning capabilities to complete the pilot program.
“When we were able to see that they were able to automatically produce highlight packages for every single player in the league for every single game,” Carney said, “it was a real eye-opener for us. We don’t have the kind of human resources to produce that kind of content for our minor league.”
The NBA and WSC later signed a fruitful multi-year partnership. In the 2016/17 season, WSC created more than 300,000 videos used across all NBA platforms. There were more than seven billion views of WSC-automated videos just on the NBA’s main Facebook landing page that year. WSC also powered the NBA’s Facebook Messenger bot and Google OneBox results.
WSC can’t name all of its clients due to terms of the specific agreements, but those publicly identified include the PGA Tour, March Madness Live, Turner Sports, and MLS (which has said its digital video metrics are now “off the charts”). All 30 NBA teams are also direct customers. WSC works with media entities on five continents. In June 2016, WSC had 13 employees in its Tel Aviv office; now there are about 70.
In the early days, WSC had identified the NBA as its dream client. Now, the league is WSC’s flagship partner and primary collaborator.
“It wouldn’t be giving [the NBA] too much credit to say much of our forward-thinking and every time we build the next big thing—much of it is driven by their vision,” said WSC cofounder and VP of business development Aviv Arnon. “Sometimes we come with the idea, sometimes they come up with the idea, but we became a close confidant in what they are trying to do with video.”
The inputs to WSC’s core technology are a variety of video and audio feeds, as well as statistical data and social media content. WSC then uses artificial intelligence to tag the clips with details and ratings. The company’s main two products are AVGen (the automatic video generator) and ClipPro (a cloud-based editing and curating tool). The user simply needs to assign rules, such as to compile clips of every dunk from the Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, or of every quarter in which the Rockets’ James Harden hits four three-pointers.
“The deeper the data, the more we can associate with the play,” said Shaka Arnon, Aviv’s brother, who spearheads the company’s U.S. operations in New York.
Shaka sees two parallel trends at play in digital video. The content has moved from global to local to personal. Distribution, meanwhile, has moved from linear to on-demand, to video on-command. That means “not only when I want it, but how I want it, what type of video I want to see and maybe address my needs with the sponsor or with reminders to see tune-in messages,” he explained. “The video itself, I control what I see and not only what I see, where I see it on which device, but how i see it.”
The MLS and NBA have both touted being able to create video on a regional basis as successes. Shaka gave an example: On Oct. 31, 2015, Warriors star Stephen Curry scored 53 points in New Orleans—clearly the top headline around the NBA. The night before, Jazz center and French native Rudy Gobert made seven blocks in Philadelphia. WSC created highlight reels for both performances. In France, the Curry video notched 1.5 million views, but the Gobert reel tallied 3 million.
Even better, Carney added, is that WSC can input all of the NBA’s many feeds. Some games, for instance, will have a national broadcast, a home team’s regional broadcast, an away team’s regional broadcast, and international broadcasts in a multitude of foreign languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Thai, French, and Italian.
Fans in other countries care greatly about their local heroes, Carney said, but they tend to care even more about following their global superstars in their own language. He said content that is produced in a local language, no matter the star, can generate five times the engagement of content that is not. Fans in Portugal, for example, would rather watch LeBron James clips in Portuguese.
“The big win is the content localization,” he said. “That’s really a game-changer. The amount of human resources that you would need to actually execute that is huge.”
WSC has come along way since its founding in 2006. At the time, four university friends who were serving in the Israeli military had built software to help coaches scout players and prepare for their next game by seeking patterns and trends. (WSC stands for “World Scouting Center.”) That initial platform was used by the Israeli national basketball team and, later, by powerhouse Maccabi Tel Aviv, the biggest basketball team in the country. WSC grew to the rest of the basketball league and some soccer, too. A subsequent idea for a fan-facing consumer product floundered without having enough of the appropriate rights.
The pivot to a media product began in 2011 and set in motion accelerating success. The company now has aspirations to apply the technology for more broadcasters, and there could be potential use cases for in-play betting now that the U.S. Supreme Court has opened the door for states to legalize sports wagers.
WSC has maintained a sense of levity during this growth. The company website calls its own product “automagical,” complete with Urban Dictionary citation, and offers a “wacky mode” with candids of the team on basketball cards. And Aviv Arnon laughed at the circumstances of how WSC secured a second round of funding from Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert. (WSC has also received investment from Intel Capital and the ownership groups of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Minnesota Vikings.)
WSC’s founders tried repeatedly to set up a meeting with Gilbert at CES a couple of years ago while they were raising their Series B round. After failing to do that through an intermediary, they tried to reach out directly to Gilbert the night before he was leaving Las Vegas. Gilbert’s assistant replied at midnight, suggesting they were welcome to meet him the next morning at the airport—in six hours.
Arriving bleary-eyed in the pre-dawn darkness, WSC’s founders finally connected with Gilbert. “I knew you would come,” Gilbert said. On a 45-minute flight on his private plane to San Jose, they finalized terms. Then, the WSC executives took a commercial return flight to the desert. “By 11 a.m.,” Arnon said with a smile, “we were already back.”