The American National Basketball Association (NBA) has partnered with an Israeli high-tech firm to provide fans with customized highlight clips of their favorite stars in near real time, during games and immediately after them.
Israel21c reported that the NBA has partnered with WSC Sports Technologies of Ramat Gan, which created the technology that generates and delivers customized highlights automatically.
Fans receive access to the best daily, weekly and monthly moments from their favorite teams and players. The clips are featured across the NBA’s numerous websites worldwide and on many team sites as well.
Since the new technology was launched at the start of the 2015-16 NBA season in October, a total of about 35,000 NBA highlight packages have been generated via the system as of the end of December, according to Aviv Arnon, WSC’s vice president for business development.
Each highlight clip is customized to the fan’s specifications.
The need for the automated creation of clips became clear during the previous NBA season, when fans around the world viewed a record 4.2 billion videos on NBA.com and NBA Mobile.
WSC does this with a unique set of technologies based on cloud-computing, sports data integration, image processing, audio analysis and automatic editing algorithms.
“The technology can support any sport,” Arnon told ISRAEL21c. “We’ve implemented it for basketball, American football, football [soccer] and cricket, and we are in talks with professional soccer, football, rugby, baseball and hockey leagues as well.”
In addition, WSC will begin working with e-sports leagues and high-school sports to provide highlight clips.
Like many other successful Israeli startups, WSC was thought up by military technology veterans Arnon, CEO Daniel Shichman and CTO Shmulik Yoffe, all 34-year-old electrical engineers, along with COO Hy Gal, 37, a basketball-playing computer scientist and assistant coach for the Israeli Academic National Basketball Team.
"We were still in the army when we conceptualized it,” said Arnon. “Being sports fans, we came up with the idea of building video-analysis software for coaches for scouting purposes. We started giving it for free to the Israeli national team. Then it was picked up by Maccabi Tel Aviv and then by the entire Israeli league. Every professionally coached team in Israel is still using our legacy product that started as more of a hobby.”