United Soccer League Uses AI To Create Clips in Near Real Time Automated workflow produces more video, without an increase in staffing By Troy Dreier, Contributor, Streaming & Digital
Monday, June 11, 2018 - 10:27 am
Print This Story
Story Highlights
With more than 550 games in the regular season alone, creating clips for all the United Soccer League's various social platforms is daunting. When hiring additional video editors stopped being a feasible solution, the USL went looking for a different path. And that path was AI.
Artificial intelligence is proving itself in the world of sports video. Although human editors will always be in demand, AI tools are able to create clips and populate them with tags and metadata. Clip creation is a problem the FIFA World Cup is solving with help from IBM's Watson, but the USL is going with a solution from WSC Sports.
The league first gave WSC a try during the 2017 USL Cup Playoffs, running 15 games through the company's software. According to Vincent Wiskowski, director, digital projects and emerging technology, USL, his team was impressed with the ease of the workflow, as well as the fact that video production could be increased without increasing staffing.
While we actually had fewer staff members working on game nights, he says, we were simultaneously producing probably five times as much content. The real value was the information we now had about each game: the technology was allowing us to search through about 300 plays it had tagged per game. This is when it became clear that we had to make the partnership happen in time for the 2018 season.
That's why the USL has announced an ongoing partnership with WSC Sports to automate creation of highlight clips for all of the league's regular-season and playoff games. The WSC turns out between 250 and 300 clips per game, notes Shaka Arnon, head of U.S. operations, WSC Sports. His company's software identifies each play and creates a unique clip for it; whether it's a shot on goal, a defensive error, or a defensive act or assist, it gets a clip.
Even having to wade through 300 automatically generated clips would be a burden, but WSC Sports solves that by rating each play based on its place in the game, the score, and the responses of the crowd and commentator. That rating lets editors jump to the most important plays in each game. The software can create highlight reels of a game's best moments at whatever length the user requests.
WSC Sports does all this using two software products. AVGen automatic video generator creates content at scale and turns out highlight reels, and Clipro online directory lets editors access the plays from each game and curate their own selections.
WSC is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, with a staff in the dozens. Its software runs in the cloud and is hosted by Microsoft Azure. Vista Worldlink live-streams USL's live videos to Azure, and AVGen creates clips instantly. The software has run hundreds of concurrent operations, and, as long as Azure can scale up with demand, there's no limit to the number of clips it can process. AVGen is optimized to create clips for 10 sports: soccer, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, tennis, cricket, golf, surfing, and esports. The company has worked with the NBA for four seasons, as well as with Cricket Australia, FIBA, the Australian Basketball League, and the World Basketball Association.
For the USL, having instant access to its best clips has a variety of advantages. We see video - and especially live game footage - as a way to grow our brand and engage our current fans, Wiskowski says. One of the objectives in this partnership was about getting our clubs and players to use their own match footage to build their brand.
Another one, he continues, was figuring out how to provide video to media to help grow our brand. It has also allowed us to quickly turn around and share video content with our broadcast partner, ESPN, which has aired more of the best moments from the 2018 USL regular season on linear broadcasts than ever before. In the past month, we had a week where four goals appeared on the ESPN SportsCenter top 10, something we'd never have been able to contemplate in the past.
Highlight clips even help behind the scenes. Clubs, for example, use them to analyze their performance and that of their opponents. Clubs can create highlight reels of only particular types of plays, then show them to players to help improve weaknesses.
WSC Sports continues to improve features to attract more customers. Plans call for support of more sports in the near future, along with localization and personalization features to give every viewer the appropriate highlights. Fans will be able to share those personalized highlights over social media.
Thanks to AI, the future of sports will be highly personalized. Viewers may enjoy the same games, but they definitely won't have the same experience.
Most recent headlines
16/12/2025
Hawkins has landed on Spotify, just in time for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume...
16/12/2025
Wherever you are, your favorite music and audio content should go seamlessly with you. That's why Spotify has partnered with NAVER Corp, Korea's leading...
16/12/2025
2025 Wrapped arrived bigger and bolder than ever. This year's experience is designed to be ultra personal and shareable, with new features like Wrapped Part...
16/12/2025
Three 12-kilowatt Advanced Electric Propulsion System thrusters, supplied by L3Harris Technologies, form the core of Gateway's propulsion system. Pictured i...
16/12/2025
The challenge facing America's defense industrial base is not just about speed - its about rebuilding the foundation that makes speed possible. Our nations ...
16/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
16/12/2025
SEVILLE, Spain Canal Sur, the public broadcasting service for Andalusia, Spain, has completed a total technology refresh based on Pebble's resilient, softwa...
16/12/2025
NEW YORK Teleprompting hardware provider Telescript International has acquired all software code and intellectual property previously owned by Telescript West. ...
16/12/2025
As cable operators face increased competition from 5G fixed wireless access providers, a new report from Ookla Research finds that T-Mobile is the FWA speed lea...
16/12/2025
Apple has announced a major upgrade to the Apple TV app for device owners outside the Apple ecosystem with news that the Apple TV app for Android now supports G...
16/12/2025
Space42 grows Direct-to-Device partner ecosystem through a Memorandum of Underst...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON Announces Release Date for Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 R...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON's Kyivstar Invests in Renewable Energy in Ukraine with Acq...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Emma Appleton, Fares Fares, Frida Gustavsson and Jakob Oftebro...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Docu-reality My Korean Boyfriend Gets a Trailer and Premiere D...
16/12/2025
Harmonic's XOS Advanced Media Processor Improves Streaming Video Quality and Boosts Viewer Engagement SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 16, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: ...
16/12/2025
RT Sport Awards 2025 live on RT One and RT Player at 8:05pm on Saturday 20 December.
On Saturday 20 December live on RT One and RT Player at the earlier t...
16/12/2025
Singer -songwriter Brian Kennedy has been announced as the final celebrity dance...
15/12/2025
Harlem Globetrotters Celebrate 100th Anniversary With New Brand Campaign From Th...
15/12/2025
Top L-R: La Tierra Del Valor (The Home of the Brave), Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawe...
15/12/2025
L3Harris will leverage 15 years of experience supporting the E-4B Nightwatch and...
15/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the loss of federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and operational changes, the statewide pub...
15/12/2025
BOULDER, Colo. Public Media Venture Group (PMVG), Venture Technologies Group (VTG), and WQED have completed a multipart agreement that they say will significant...
15/12/2025
Cape Town, November 13, 2025 - SES and International artist and humanitarian, Fo...
15/12/2025
Luxembourg, December 15, 2025 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Abra Group launched fast and reliable multi-orbit inflight connectivity service on t...
15/12/2025
How Rivian s Design Puts Drivers First-And Why That Matters Published on Dec 15, 2025 Categories: Business Solutions
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Sha...
15/12/2025
Space42 and Cobham Satcom completed the full range of advanced terminals for the...
15/12/2025
15 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan Delivers First Starlink Direct to Cel...
15/12/2025
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor finds himself the topic of year's cracker jokes
Oasis, David Harbour, Celebrity Traitors and Angela Rayner all feature in this y...
15/12/2025
Comscore Expands Cross-Platform Campaign Measurement to Include Audio and Social New capabilities strengthen cross-platform campaign reporting suite; CCR rebran...
15/12/2025
NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD - the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) ...
15/12/2025
RT .ie has reached one billion page views this year and is on track to finish 2025 2% ahead of last year. Average time spent on the site is up 3% on 2024, with ...
15/12/2025
Modern workflows showcase the endless possibilities of generative and agentic AI on PCs.
Of many, some examples include tuning a chatbot to handle product-supp...
13/12/2025
Powering Client Growth: Horizon Deepens Nielsen Partnership, Enabling More Effic...
13/12/2025
In a move that will help it offer more flexible and less costly programming options, YouTube TV has announced that it will be launching YouTube TV Plans with mo...
13/12/2025
SINGAPORE Magna Systems has designed, built and completed what is believed to be the first full UHD and IP-based OB truck in Southeast Asia for a Singapore medi...
12/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Everything You Need to Know for Next Week's Big Sho...
12/12/2025
Hailey Gates at the Atropia premiere (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
12/12/2025
Last month, Spotify announced a new collaboration with the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men's professional tennis, aimed at bringing the next gene...
12/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the elimination of Federal federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and changes in the way they...
12/12/2025
Wisycom and DPA Microphones announce the appointment of Ren Moerch as Group Product Director, Wireless, a strategic leadership role that will guide the combine...
12/12/2025
SMPTE , the home of media professionals, technologists, and engineers, in conjuncture with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Entertainment Technolog...
12/12/2025
Keepit, the vendor-independent, cloud-native data protection provider, today announced a strategic go-to-market relationship in Poland with Ingram Micro, a lead...
12/12/2025
Atomos announced the immediate availability of a new firmware update for its Ninja TX GO and Ninja TX monitor-recorders, unlocking Open Gate 48P RAW recording w...
12/12/2025
Professional Wireless Systems (PWS) once again played a critical role in delivering flawless wireless coordination and support at the 2025 Latin Grammy Awards a...
12/12/2025
The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), together with the Video Services Forum (VSF), the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) and the European Broadc...
12/12/2025
DHD audio will demonstrate the latest additions to its range of digital audio production solutions on Booth 321 in Hall B6 at Hamburg Open 2026. The show will b...
12/12/2025
Chaos today announces the release of V-Ray for Blender, update 2, bringing its award-winning rendering technology to even more Blender users by adding support f...
12/12/2025
Lighting specialist UltraLEDs has launched Precision LED Tape, a high-CRI lighting solution designed specifically for professional film, TV, and studio use.
P...
United Soccer League Uses AI To Create Clips in Near Real Time Automated workflow produces more video, without an increase in staffing By Troy Dreier, Contributor, Streaming & Digital 
