How UPA Asia scaled live pickleball production across countries with one platform

The United Pickleball Association (UPA) Asia is driving the growth of professional pickleball across the continent. Launched in 2024, it operates the PPA Tour Asia and Major League Pickleball (MLP) Asia, delivering world-class tournaments and player development programs to new audiences.

But scaling a new professional sport across Asia came with a unique operational challenge: delivering broadcast-quality live content and social storytelling with a lean, distributed team, often from entirely different countries, venues, and production partners each week.

Scaling live production across countries

UPA Asia runs events across multiple countries, including Malaysia, China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Japan, working with different local broadcast partners at every stop. Unlike leagues with fixed venues or centralized production teams, each event came with a new setup, new infrastructure, and new technical constraints.

This means there is a lean remote team managing the entire live stream, clipping, and distribution of all the media. UPA Asia needed a platform that could simplify complexity, reduce overhead, and remain reliable across borders, without sacrificing quality or speed.

One platform, end-to-end

UPA Asia initially thought about using ScorePlay to only centralize and distribute existing media across partners and social channels. However, it became clear they needed more than content management: they wanted to run live streaming and clipping within the same workflow.

The priority wasn’t additional features, but reliability in varied production environments. Together, the teams ran technical tests across different event setups, validating that ScorePlay was the correct choice for all the changing infrastructure and crews throughout events.

“What mattered most to us was reliability. Every event is in a different country with a different setup, and ScorePlay proved it could handle live ingest and clipping consistently. ScorePlay Studio let us centralize everything, live production and content management, in one place.” Wade Townsend, UPA Asia

UPA Asia powered 5 events for PPA Tour Asia 2025 using a workflow built for speed and simplicity. Across the season, the platform has supported over 65,000 downloads and 22,400+ minutes of video, with an average of three receivers per event ensuring reliable live ingest. Through a custom YouTube integration, the same live feeds are seamlessly published, archived, and distributed, aligning live broadcasts with on-demand content for maximum operational efficiency.

A blueprint for modern, global sports operations

ScorePlay enables UPA Asia to operate like a much larger organization, without the complexity or overhead for a fast turnaround across countries and partners. Instead of juggling tools, transfers, and vendors, they run live events, clipping, storage, and distribution from one platform, no matter where the tournament takes place.

Emerging leagues can scale internationally while scaling headcount in a healthy way by using ScorePlay’s end-to-end capabilities, building media operations that are portable, resilient, and future-ready.

About UPA Asia

UPA Asia is the owner of the premier professional and amateur pickleball tour, the PPA Tour Asia, and pickleball league, MLP Asia. Developing professional pickleball athletes and fostering a community in Asia, UPA Asia will forge world-class events, teams, professional pathways, high-performance training and long-term partnerships.

About ScorePlay

ScorePlay is a best-in-class media solution that provides automated architecture to centralise, distribute, and classify your digital assets, whether photos, videos, or live broadcasts. We are transforming sports organizations, automating their creative processes and growing their brands and unlocking new revenue. ScorePlay is a bridge to the future of sports storytelling, from content capture to fan consumption. Automate. Grow. Unlock. For more information, visit scoreplay.com.