Sports TV Awards Winner: Creating automagical OTT experiences with WSC Sports
WSC Sports is the brainchild of Daniel Shichman and his three co-founders, COO Hy Gal, CBDO Aviv Arnon, and CTO Shmulik Yoffe, good friends for 22 years who wanted to work together in the sports media space
According to WSC co-founder and CEO, Daniel Shichman, 2021 has been an amazing year of growth for the company “both in terms of the number of clients and new geographies, and continuing to position ourselves as the gold-standard in the market”.
That positive feeling was bolstered by receiving the SVG Europe Sports TV Award for Outstanding OTT Experience, which the company won for its innovative technology that automatically creates and publishes sports highlights.
The judges stated: “Rarely does a game-changing product come along that immediately delivers on its promise, but this entry has managed exactly that. Amongst a very high-quality field, this one stood out.”
“It is a great honour and recognition to be winning such a prestigious award, especially when we faced high-quality competitors,” says Shichman. “We work very hard all year long and getting this recognition, especially on a new product, is very rewarding. It just makes us want to get back and work even harder to make sure our clients are satisfied and are getting the best solutions out there.
“I also want to thank the amazing team at WSC for always caring, doing whatever it takes and being super professional. This team is the key to everything we have achieved so far and all of the ambitious things we still need to accomplish.”
Daniel Shichman from WSC Sports says: “Every sport is different and we run several models for each type of sport on the video and audio layers to try and understand everything we can from the stream, whether it is identifying a made shot in basketball, players location and passes in football (soccer) or every rally in tennis”
Smart thinking
WSC is the brainchild of Shichman and his three co-founders, COO Hy Gal, CBDO Aviv Arnon, and CTO Shmulik Yoffe, good friends for 22 years who wanted to work together in the sports media space. “We are sports fans and have a technology background,” Shichman says. “We started studying the space back in 2012 and saw the trends of rising prices of media rights along with the growth of digital consumption, piracy and the fact that creating content is a hard task.
“We approached several sports organisations and started talking to them about the challenge and what we had in mind and quickly understood there are many implementations and use-cases for automated content creation.”
“We see that the viewing experience is rapidly changing with sports fans cutting the cord, watching much more short-form content and also watching that content on many platforms. This creates a big challenge for the media rights owners both in the content creation process as well as finding new monetisation avenues for the content”
The artificial intelligence (AI) cloud platform enables sports media right owners to generate personalised and customised sports videos automatically and in real time.
WSC Sports’ Daniel Shichman
“Every sport is different and we run several models for each type of sport on the video and audio layers to try and understand everything we can from the stream, whether it is identifying a made shot in basketball, players location and passes in football (soccer) or every rally in tennis,” Shichman explains. “Using our algorithms we manage to identify the occurrence of an event, the ‘perfect’ start and end time and also add a rating to the event. Besides the events themselves, we add data on the different scenes and extract every information we can to help us understand better what is being shown and how relevant that can be to highlights videos that are created during and after the game.”
High accuracy is key with the system as professional sports organisations rely on it to create content. “In generic AI models the accuracy can be ‘good enough’ but for leagues, broadcasters and teams this quality is not enough,” says Shichman. “We [have to] make sure we can build the best platform that specialises and understands sports best and will create the most interesting content.”
He says is very easy to set up a demo or a quick and dirty solution to identify some events in the video, but working to a huge scale – WSC analyses more than 100,000 games a year – and keeping a very high level of accuracy poses a very hard engineering problem.
Shichman says the starting point is to define as much as possible. Asking the right questions is key: “What are we trying to understand in the sport and what is the desired outcome?”
“For most of our algorithms we use supervised learning, which means that we collect data, or get it from our clients, and train our neural networks using different architectures and types of networks, depending on the problem we are trying to solve,” he continues.
The platform has a very easy to use user interface, through which users can ask the system to create any type of content, define the length, graphics, transitions and where the content will be published to.
“We have integrations to more than 30 different publish points starting from social media platforms, through video management systems, Cloud provider’s storage and others,” says Shichman. “This enables our clients to easily create content within seconds and distribute customised and relevant content to every platform. We see that each platform and use-case require different content in terms of length, graphics, resolution and monetisation restrictions and by using our platform they can create a relevant video for each use-case right away.”
Big leagues
The sports media market was WSC’s go-to-market from the start. “We are now working with more than 200 sports organisations globally and among our clients, you can find the NBA, NHL, ESPN, Bundesliga, YouTubeTV, FIBA and many others.
“The clients started using us to generate customised video content for their social media accounts, their website and mobile apps both in real time and also pre and post-match,” he continues. “After understanding the potential, we see most of our clients using the content in new touch-points with the fan; generating new revenue streams by using specific content – whether it is creating a new content package for a sponsor, integrating to Google search, syndicating content to publishers, and creating localised content per territory. There are many more examples.”
In the last year, the WSC roster grew by more than 60 clients worldwide and managed to grow significantly in Europe. “This was a target we set at the beginning of the year and I feel we have done an outstanding job growing in this important territory,” Shichman says. “We also expanded our technology to support more sports, including horse racing, horse jumping and skiing to enable us to continue growing and help our clients cover more sports, provide the best experience to their fans and generate new revenue streams.
“We continue to invest a lot of resources into our product to continue and make sure it is on the cutting edge and provides the best experience and output,” he continues. “As the company continues to grow, we expand our offerings to try and support every interaction a fan has with video content.”
Embedded highlights
Two new products are using the main technology engine. “The Broadcast Pro is embedded within the Adobe Premiere station of our clients and offers a fully automated content creation workflow in their broadcast quality systems in the exact same manner they got it till now for their digital and social media channels,” says Shichman. “It provides them with a full end-to-end solution for content creation for both the linear and digital departments.
“Web stories is a new product we developed and worked very closely on with Google,” he continues. “The product creates real time videos in story format and integrates it into Google Search, enabling fans to search for anything they would like and get a story that is updated throughout the game. It provides fans with a great experience and is also an amazing marketing tool for user acquisition for OTT and betting operators. Fans that search for something have high intent and if they watch a video that was just created they are more likely to go watch the game or place a bet. We just launched the product this year and already have more than 20 clients using it and the click-through rate we see in the product is very high and we continue to improve and optimise all the time.”
In 2022, WSC plans to continue to invest heavily in the platform and product. “We’ll also continue to support more use-cases of fan engagement, whether for broadcast, user acquisition for OTT, unique betting solutions that use videos for acquisition and retention, and enhanced and interactive experiences for OTT users,” Shichman says.
“We see that the viewing experience is rapidly changing with sports fans cutting the cord, watching much more short-form content and also watching that content on many platforms. This creates a big challenge for the media rights owners both in the content creation process as well as finding new monetisation avenues for the content. I am sure next year will be exciting and hope we will continue to succeed and grow while maintaining our smiles and positive energy.”