NBA Uses Artificial Intelligence Developed by WSC Sports for Highlight Clips
With the increasing reliance on social media in today’s society, social media has quickly become an important platform to reach sports fans. The NBA has recognized this, and the ever growing need to create customized content for its fans. Since 2014, the NBA has partnered with Israeli company, WSC Sports, to experiment with artificial intelligence to analyze highlights and key moments of the game.
During All Star weekend, the NBA employed software developed by WSC Sports to create multiple clips and content for every single player on the court. Shaka Arnon, the general manager of WSC North America, described the software as “[using] machine learning or AI to take a combination of visual, audio and data cues to identify big moments in the game, as well as identify each and every play of the game, to create shareable highlights”.
Bob Carney, Senior Vice President of social and digital strategy for the NBA noted that this level of personalized content is something that the NBA would not do in the past, as it was tedious work requiring manual labour to push content out across 200 social and digital platforms across the U.S. Prior to this evolutionary software, it could “take an hour to cut a post-game highlights package”. Now, according to Carney, “it takes just a few minutes to create over 1,000 highlight packages”.
The NBA is pioneering the way in which sport and media can be integrated with technology and innovation to create more personalized content for its fans. By employing WSC Sports’ artificial intelligence software, the NBA is able to provide fans with the content they want to see, when they want at their fingertips.