2024-05-28
WSC Sports launches three new products aimed at connecting with fans and monetizing digital rights


WSC Sports pioneered the use of AI in digital sports media when it launched a decade ago, and the industry leader with more than 450 clients is now broadening its offering in "a natural evolution" of its technology, CEO Daniel Shichman said.

Fresh off the creation of a standalone department dedicated to generative artificial intelligence, WSC Sports has created three new products to provide a more comprehensive solution to rightsholders trying to connect with fans and monetize their digital rights.

Among the innovations are an expansion of WSC Sports' AI engine to index and analyze not just game footage but all relevant media types, as well as the creation of an in-app video player that will help rightsholders collect more user data for the purpose of further customizing content. WSC Sports is also rebranding its visual identity to mark this reimagined path forward.

The first challenge WSC Sports helped solve 10 years ago, Shichman noted, was helping rightsholders create content at scale and for every digital platform. Monetizing that content, however, remains an industry challenge that the company is now endeavoring to solve.

"We're seeing that a lot of organizations are starting to go direct to consumer and starting to try to know the fan and to create personalized content for all of their fans because they understand that, if they can connect with these fans, they'll be able to generate new revenue streams," Shichman said. "That's exactly where we see where the market is heading."

The three new products are Around the Game, which is the enhanced indexing engine; In-App Stories, which enable vertical video insertion in owned-and-operated platforms; and Discovery Network, which includes cross-publication on third-party platforms to maximize reach and revenue.

Shichman gave an example of a new capability, noting that, previously, WSC Sports, a recent SBJ Tech honoree as one of its 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies in 2023 and the Best in AI category winner, could analyze all of Caitlin Clark's actions from a game and create a highlight reel. Now, it can understand her postgame press conference to identify a particular play she was discussing and automatically run a split-screen video with the relevant clip. Around the Game can cull not just those interviews but bus arrivals or other ancillary moments to the games themselves.

And WSC Sports could previously publish to apps and social platforms, but the content management laid outside their jurisdiction. The new software development kit (SDK) retains the ability to track viewership. Early adoption of this in-app product includes 16 pilot partners, including NASCAR and LaLiga.

"We're actually expanding our offerings to also be the player itself, and by doing that, we can see the interaction of the user with the content," Shichman said. "And once we know that, it helps us to really understand more and then create tailored content."

Permeating all its new products is the application of generative AI, whose development will be managed as its own group within the company under the leadership of Itai Epstein, who previously led business development in China and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). He described the operations of the Gen AI department "as a new startup within WSC." Its foundation will be a large sports model, LSM, that is catered to the industry as opposed to more general large language models (LLMs).

"What we'll try to do here is basically what the company did 10 years ago - before AI was cool," Epstein said. "We were the first ones to apply AI in sports media and allowed rights holders to benefit from this new technology back then. So our vision for this new department now, which is just a natural evolution of the company, as an AI company, is to make sure that the industry benefits from anything you can get from this new exciting technology called generative AI."

Source:SBJ

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