July 20, 2023
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Major League Pickleball (MLP) is a startup league that is looking to capture new audiences and establish itself as one of the dominant spectator sports in the United States. Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the United States, and MLP is a team-based competition of professionals created by Austin-based Steve Kuhn in 2021. They needed a media solution that matched their innovation, ambition and creativity.
Creating a league from scratch is a challenge in and of itself, but media in a digital world presents even more hurdles. We shadowed MLP’s media team at an event in Daytona in March, donned our workflow-nerds hats, and began iterating as to how exactly we could automate their media workflows with our custom sports-specific technology. From photo, to video, and all the way to broadcast ingestion and live clipping, the team had lofty ambitions and aspirations for what an all-in-one media tool would look like. We duly obliged. No bottlenecks. No headaches. Just seamless media flow from content capture to consumption.
The most innovative leagues realise that engaging the younger generation of fans is a challenge - but also an opportunity to build a new storytelling model with their media. Unique and original content intended for social media is captivating in its innate realism compared to broadcast footage, or in addendum to it. Organisations like MLP need a centralised workflow to access this media in real-time on match or competition days so they can adapt to the needs of every stakeholder in the ecosystem. Collect from every source (team, players, agencies, partners, fans) and distribute to everyone to grow their league and brand.
ScorePlay will be the beating heart of MLP’s media ecosystem, providing the operating system for their photo (with FTP integration), hand-held and video content (snippets and long-form). We built them a custom YouTube integration that allows them to ingest their broadcast live, and use our custom live-clipping feature to get content out to their fans immediately. This integration also allows them to publish short and long videos automatically to YouTube, saving hours and hours of manual labour per event, all this while the stream is still ongoing. Additionally, we developed Control room, a time-based tagging system that allows them manually tag their video content with relevant tags that cannot be automatically identified with AI (see below), to allow for faster video clipping.
And it wouldn’t be ScorePlay without distribution. Our custom rules and automatic distribution means every team and stakeholder can access their content in seconds, from photo, to video clips and broadcast-quality matches. Live clipping means they can clip as a broadcast is happening, and share this short-form content direct to social media. Easy as 1, 2, 3. As quick as that too.
The centralisation, classification and distribution of sports media assets needs to be consolidated on a single platform for a seamless real-time experience free of manual bottlenecks. Long has the sports media landscape relied on a variety of tools that crowd creative teams and disrupt a logical efficient workflow (from PhotoShelter, Dropbox for storage, and Greenfly for distribution).
The new generation of sports fans demand social-media-ready content in real-time as they consume, and having an all-in-one solution allows sports organisations to be reactive, versatile and adept in their content strategy. ScorePlay automates the centralisation, classification and distribution of assets with AI. A media hub built for the sports industry. Every user can easily browse the photos or videos they need and incorporate them seamlessly into whatever story they are crafting, from club-photographer content, to UGC all through ScorePlay Pulse.
Storytelling simplified, collaborative photo and video sharing made easy.
Try for free.
Personalized onboarding.
Dedicated customer service representative.
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