How FIS turned its athletes into its biggest media channel

FIS, the international governing body for ski and snowbard, had the biggest digital season in its history. The number everyone will quote is reach: 114.9 million people, more than double the season before. But the reach isn't the story. The story is who drove it: not federation media teams, but the athletes themselves, finally handed their own footage and the means to post it.

Overseeing World Cup competition across more than a dozen disciplines and a network of 37 national ski associations spanning six continents, its Content Exchange Platform (CXP) is the service that gets competition footage to athletes and national federations so they can post it on their own channels. Skiing and snowboarding produce some of the most followed athletes in winter sport, and the audience demand has never been in question. The opportunity in 2025/26 was to turn that demand into distribution at scale, by making the athletes themselves the engine.

The challenge: scaling media operations across a continent

Heading into 2025/26, FIS made a deliberate bet: put athletes at the centre of the platform and treat them as the distribution network. The footage was already there, and so was the audience. What had held things back was adoption: in 2024/25 federations did most of the posting, while the people audiences most want to follow stayed on the sidelines.

That was never a technology problem. The ScorePlay athlete app already existed, what changed this season was the all-in push to get athletes using it: onboarding tutorials, a support hotline, stronger comms, and presence at the venues. The moment athletes could find their own clips in seconds and post them without friction, they would.

The solution: athletes as the distribution network

ScorePlay provided FIS with the infrastructure to ingest, index, and route competition content so all athletes could find their moment in seconds. Their central media library held the validated 2025/26 content: 355,069 tagged, edited items drawn from 615,576 managed assets, each auto-tagged against FIS competition data.

How it works?

The platform ingested roughly 1,400 hours of live competition (687 production stream recordings) and turned it into 21,698 ready-to-post clips, where three quarters were cut directly from live feeds. All auto-tagged so a clip is a search, not a hunt.

Two connected workflows run it. Upstream, an edit cycle: accredited photographers upload raw images to FIS Live FTP in real time, and 24 photo editors push finished versions back into the library. Downstream, distribution flows that content to national associations, broadcasters, FIS channels, and athletes (who never touch raw uploads). Across both, the platform routed 366,641 downloads, including the 46,260 clips athletes pulled of themselves. FIS owns the audience and the brand, ScorePlay is the pipe.

The platform that had been run mainly by federation media staff, went directly into athletes' hands this year. It was used daily by nearly 2,000 of them actively self-serving their own, alongside 37 connected national associations pulling from the same library.

Scaling operations of the engine underneath

This season the model flipped. Athletes posted three times more than the federations, and hit harder, with an 8.9% engagement rate against 6.0% for federation accounts. Discipline by discipline:

• Para Snowsports athlete posts went from 3 to 198

• Nordic Combined athlete reach grew more than fifteenfold (+1,480%)

• Snowboard Alpine posting jumped sixfold (+519%) for 5.1M in reach

At the top, individual athletes reached audiences most media teams only dream of:

• Eileen Gu - 9.26M

• Lindsey Vonn - 4.56M

• Aleksander Aamodt Kilde - 2.52M

• Arvid Auner - 1.87M

"The FIS Content Exchange Platform (CXP) is one of our biggest success stories this season, and the numbers show why. When athletes are empowered with high-quality content, they become the sport's most powerful storytellers." said Lukas Brawand, Digital Strategy and Platforms Manager @ FIS.

The Result: reach, consistency and speed

Across the season, CXP content reached 114.9 million people (+107%), with 6.5M interactions (+150%) and an 8.3% average engagement rate, the biggest digital season in FIS history. Instagram did the heavy lifting at 112.1M reach. But the reach isn't the interesting part. Who drove it is.

ScorePlay: turn your athletes into your distribution network

FIS didn't add a platform. It unlocked one it already had, and the athletes did the rest. The footage, the audience, and the demand were always there. What changed was making the content one tap away from the people fans most want to follow.

If your federation is sitting on a library that isn't working hard enough, that's the opportunity. ScorePlay provides the infrastructure underneath: ingesting, indexing, and routing your content so every athlete, broadcaster, and channel can find the right moment in seconds.