The NBA is seizing a massive opportunity to grow its global brand with digital media technology. On Monday the NBA said it is working with Israeli startup WSC Sports Technologies to create and disseminate customized highlight video content in real-time.
The NBA will use WSC’s video editing platform called AVGEN which essentially automates the process of creating highlight reels. In the words of Aviv Arnon, WSC’s VP of business development, “We analyze the video itself to figure out where the players are on the court, where movement is, [and] do audio analysis to figure out the perfect ins and outs for every moment.”
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And not only can it create highlight reels, it can be incredibly smart when doing so. AVGEN can detect specific players, broadcaster commentary, crowd excitement and specific plays when building highlight reels. These capabilities will allow the NBA to quickly and efficiently create highlight reels for any player it choses. Which brings tremendous value when marketing the league internationally since it can now create a highlight reel for the more than one hundred international players that play in the league.
Just imagine when the Dallas Mavericks play the San Antonio Spurs and within minutes after the game the NBA can create and disseminate player-specific video content for the over ten international players that would have participated in the game. Now all of a sudden their is country-specific content where different fan bases can easily follow their favorite player; a fan pattern that is huge in countries around the world that follow players from their country who play in the NBA.
Additionally, the video editing capabilities of AVGEN also allow for the traditional viral content to be made. For example, the NBA can set a trigger for AVGEN to create a video every time a player scores a certain amount of points in a game. Or they can set a threshold for when Steph Curry hits four or more three-pointers in a quarter and have that video be created and shared across social channels almost immediately after Steph goes off.
“Prior to AVGEN, all of our content was produced by editors in a room cutting packages together,” Mike Allen, the NBA’s senior VP of digital products, told the Verge. Those editors haven’t been replaced, Allen insists, but are now able to create more unique packages. “With AVGEN, we now have the ability to really do almost unlimited numbers of packages based on the demand from fans around the world.”
This partnership with WSC Sports Technologies is a very forward-thinking move for the NBA. Last season the NBA had 4.2 billion video views across its content, including 98 million streams of the NBA Finals on Facebook alone. These numbers will continue to increase as the NBA can continue to disseminate its video content around the world for fans to follow the league and their favorite players.
But perhaps the most enticing part of this whole story is that the NBA and WSC could one day open up the AVGEN platform to allow fans to create their own highlight reels at their choosing. Which would lead to huge amounts of video content being created and shared and let NBA fans, which are notoriously digital media savvy, become a global network of internet based brand ambassadors.