A Reporter 101 lesson: When several unconnected people say the same thing unprompted, there is a story.
So here is one: Personalized athlete highlights, delivered automatically, directly and swiftly with AI tools, is becoming a big trend in youth sports.
Touchlynk chairman and CEO Scott Ticer challenged some of the conventional wisdom surrounding streaming in a recent conversation — and made the case for why personalized highlights have become such a priority.
“We find that parents, families and friends, if they can attend the game, yeah, they’re going to be there on the sideline rooting their kid on. But if they can’t be there, they don’t have time to watch 90-plus minutes of a game.
“What they really want to do is hit a button and see every time that their grandchild touches the ball. And if their grandchild is a midfielder and doesn’t get to touch the ball as much as others, they want to be able to go automatically to that play where their granddaughter threw the ball in and was the key to a goal.”
Touchlynk’s soccer-only platform allows users to pull up data and highlights for specific players after game video is uploaded and analyzed— the company says that process typically takes about 48 hours.
The big guns in the industry are aiming to pull it off in a fraction of the time.
Pixellot North American President Rob DeSalvo:
“The personalization of highlights, clips and moments, as we define them, is something that is becoming an expectation of parents and kids to have. The more we can do that automatically for them so they don’t have to go back and watch the whole game and segment out their clips themselves, the better their experience is going to be at the end of the day. And to combine that with the scale that we have now with PlayOn, with 15,000, 16,000 systems out there over 9,000 high schools, we’re the ones that have the amount of content to be able to do this for them in that way.”
SportsEngine VP of Video Operations Nick Busto (at the National Youth Sports Summit):
“We strive to create an experience of whether you’re at the game, you’re watching a live stream or maybe you are stuck in traffic coming home, you have the highlights from the person you care about the most delivered directly to your phone in real-time. Are we there yet? No. But when you think about personalization and content in youth sports, while we live for the long-form and live stream, personal highlights are kind of the currency. That’s where we’re going.”
Pixellot North American COO Colby Adamson:
“Our goal is to deliver content as it happens, completely automatically. The end result is you as a parent or as an athlete are getting that content pushed to you right when you need it, completely using AI. We don’t want anybody to be scrubbing through long games or going through VCR tapes. The idea is we do all the work for you and we try to make it easy through our partners to deliver.”
PlayOn Streaming and Coaching Tools President David Rudolph (on the Buying Sandlot podcast):
“Back to who's our core audience, the parents. It's nice for you to send me a summary of the game. I appreciate it. That's great. You want me to pay more? Send me highlights of my kid. That's a killer product. Send me the stats of my kid. Send me all that timestamped together. Package it all up. Make it easy for me to store it and save it. Make it where I don't have to worry about pulling out my phone and trying to film stuff at the game. Make it easy for me to share through social media. That's what I want. That's where AI is super valuable.”
We always talk about how fragmented the streaming space is— GameChanger is the dominant force (largely through baseball and softball), but still only has about a 10% market share.
The most-likely path to consolidation remains adoption rather than acquisition. And it seems clear the race to delivering these personalized products at scale with AI will be key to that process.
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