51% marketers using short-form videos offering highest ROI writes Vinayak Shrivastav

Vinayak Shrivastav, CEO and Co-founder, VideoVerse.

The sports broadcasting industry has seen a significant change due to the increasing popularity of on-demand and personalized content. Major league sports such as the IPL, Twenty20 Cricket, NBA, and Champions League have begun live streaming their events on social media and other internet platforms to keep up with the demands of a mobile audience. This shift is in response to sports fans’ growing desire to access short, concise, and high-quality content from the comfort of their mobile devices. A survey conducted by HubSpot in 2022 found that 51% of marketers use short-form videos because they offer the highest return on investment of any social media marketing technique.

Additionally, a senior media analyst for Vanity Fair conducted a survey and found that, in comparison to previous generations, nearly half of young sports fans prefer highlights to a live broadcast. Well-produced highlights, typically lasting 5 to 10 minutes, provide a condensed narrative of the sporting event without the need to watch the entire broadcast. While this is great for sports fans, it presents a challenge for broadcasters who rely on traditional editing techniques typically involving tedious and time-consuming manual processes that cannot match up with current expectations and demand by viewers.

To create these instantaneous highlights, large teams are required to manually filter through raw footage and identify key moments. This is a daunting task considering the vast amount of footage each broadcaster gathers on any given event day. To streamline this process, cutting-edge technology such as deep machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing the sports broadcasting universe. AI models can increase team productivity by reducing manual labour and help cull out the key highlights faster and more smoothly. This allows the production team to realign time and talent to focus on creating high-quality content.

Companies investing in these new technologies can retain viewers’ and also satisfy the short attention spans of viewers, this also helps meet the desire for quick content delivery and reduce overall costs for broadcasters. One example is Indian Premiere League (IPL), which attracts 426 million viewers worldwide. With 10 teams participating and 74 matches around the nation, it offers an abundance of material and content. Each match goes on for 20 overs for a duration of 90 minutes. An AI-led editing platform can help create premium short-form assets capturing the best of the play or player and keep on-the-go viewers engaged across devices.

While established over-the-top platforms like Amazon Prime Video, Facebook Watch, YouTube TV, and Netflix are expanding in their respective markets and challenging the status quo by implementing AI and ML technologies to create shorter snackable content, linear broadcasters still have the advantage of securing valuable media rights. To remain competitive, traditional broadcasters must also venture into short-form content, particularly during major sporting events like IPL where there may be long pauses before a highlight occurs.

AI has the potential to completely transform how broadcasters deliver content to consumers through content contextualization and advanced metadata management. AI cognitive technologies such as vision models, optical character recognition, audio detection, facial recognition, spatial awareness, and object recognition can significantly improve the quality of metadata captured while eliminating human error through automated processes.

This is a prime opportunity for broadcasters to leverage and update their content archives. AI/ML powered meta-tagging significantly reduces the chance of human errors and ensures engaging key highlights are available in real-time. There are various video editing platforms in the market space. The best way to assess and choose your right fit is by requesting for a demo and taking a decision based on the solution that offers the most flexible and personalised editing solutions to support you in reaching your target audience.


By Vinayak Shrivastav, CEO and Co-founder, VideoVerse.