When Czechia’s national team won the 2024 Ice Hockey Worlds—the preeminent event in European hockey—nearly 30% of the country tuned in to watch on TV, while the games themselves saw record attendance.
To deliver more in-game action to hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic fans, the Czech Extraliga and its marketing partner, BPA Sports Marketing, enlisted the help the WSC Sports platform to give their content strategy a power play.
“We were looking to get a better return on Czech Extraliga’s media rights, and more than anything, we wanted to deliver fans more of the content they love from the league. With WSC Sports, on Instagram alone we’ve created six times the number of videos from our previous season, and the amount of reactions from fans has also exploded.”
MAKING AN IMPACT ON SOCIAL WITH VERTICAL VIDEO
Anyone that’s edited hockey content knows keeping the action center-frame is a serious challenge. One made more difficult when converting horizontal game footage into vertical videos for social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
While the majority of videos created by Extraliga were horizontal, 40%—3.5K videos—were automatically converted to a vertical, 9:16, ratio for the aforementioned platforms. The driving force behind that increase was Magicrop, a unique feature on the WSC Sports platform that uses AI to crop any video into a vertical format while maintaining focus on the action.
By introducing automation, the league massively increased the amount of content it shared on social media, which resulted in tens of thousands of new followers over the duration of one season.
A 180° SHIFT IN CONTENT STRATEGY
In total, BPA’s content team set up 180 unique rules in the WSC Sports platform that automatically created videos of goals, assists, shootouts, checks, fights, and much more. They also added rules to generate recaps of top plays from every week and month during the season.
With each video tailored for its final destination, the team can quickly serve fans with content that’s optimized for any platform, whether it’s real-time highlights on Twitter, ref-cam footage on YouTube Shorts, or top play compilations on Instagram. Beyond delivering content to fans, BPA also uses WSC Sports to send content to Extraliga teams and broadcast partners; automatically creating and sending videos of specific players to the relevant parties.
Overall, the increase in content production has satisfied the fans, who are viewing more Extraliga content than ever before, and the front office whose ultimate goal is to continue to build an audience around one of the most exciting leagues to watch in all of Europe.