The announcement was made at the fourth-annual ESPN Edge Innovation Conference held in New York City.
The event featured commentary and discussions from executives of both ESPN and its aforementioned partners; focusing on some of the recent, major developments that have come to fruition.
Asked about the role of AI at the company, ESPN’s Chairman, Jimmy Pitaro named WSC Sports as the best example of how they’re leveraging the technology to create a better offering for fans.
For those that don’t know, our partnership enables us to create highlights at scale. Highlights that we might not have been able to present to sports fans around more niche sports because it’s not really a positive return for us on investment to go out and hire a lot more people to clip these highlights…If you look at our offering now, we have many more highlights because of AI. ”
Later on, speaking on a panel alongside ESPN’s VP of Sports Business Development and Innovation, Kevin Lopes, Accenture’s Chief AI Officer, Lan Guan, Microsoft’s CTO for Media and Entertainment, Andy Beach, and Meta’s Director of Metaverse Entertainment, Sarah Malkin, WSC Sports Co-Founder Aviv Arnon touched on what it meant to be a member of the Edge Innovation Center.
Being a part of Edge is getting access as a partner to see under the hood. We can see what their next big challenges are, and shift direction with them to innovate in the places where they really need to invest more.”
He also spoke on WSC Sports’ expanded AI capabilities which enable its clients to capture highlights beyond just in-game footage—to be able to tell the full story of the game—from player arrivals to post-game interviews.
“We’ve taken the next step in the product to cover not only the game footage itself, but everything around the game as well. We’re taking the interviews, the press conferences, the players coming on the court, the coach getting angry or whatever, and even the studio shows. This is a cool way to change automated content storytelling.”
Aviv also touched on the fact that WSC Sports recently launched a department exclusively focused on new developments in GenAI, and spoke about a particular use case using AI commentary to generate scripts capable of translating broadcast commentary into multiple languages, like French, Spanish, and Portuguese.