HOW AI-AUTOMATED PRODUCTION IS RESHAPING SPORTS IN 8,000 HIGH SCHOOLS

BACKGROUND

The NFHS Network is a joint venture to increase the coverage of High School sports. It was formed between the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), its member-state associations, and PlayOn! Sports who are the exclusive rights holders.

Typically, the network broadcasted live sporting events in two ways:

1. Network production – whereby the network employed camera operators, an outside broadcast van, and specialist production staff to broadcast high-profile playoff matches.

2. Student production – utilizing the School Broadcast Program (SBP), which was launched by PlayOn! Sports in 2010 to provide a platform and tools enabling student teams to produce home events.

CHALLENGE

The production staff, equipment, and management costs involved in network productions were prohibitive and led to very few high school games being broadcast.
Manual production by school teams was complicated, the broadcast quality was inconsistent, and the bandwidth resources required limited the number of games the NFHS network was capable of streaming to the public. In other words, they were difficult to produce, difficult to scale, and therefore difficult to monetize.

OBJECTIVE

To simplify the production of high school sporting events, to enable more live streaming of events per season and to generate revenues
that would make the whole operation financially beneficial for all parties involved.

SOLUTION

Pixellot pioneered the development of a fully automated end-to-end production system that captures all the action on the court or field and streams it live or on-demand in HD, with customized graphics. This AI-Automated production solution is enabling the NFHS Network to broadcast high school sporting events to fans, friends, and family in high quality.

BUSINESS MODEL

PlayOn’s business model calls for selling the hardware to the school at a subsidized cost, with no recurring fees. The project is monetized from multiple sources: syndicated content to third-party publishers such as Facebook, sponsorships, and primarily through a monthly paid subscription fee via their OTT platform. Starting at $10.95 a month, a portion of the subscription fees collected go to the school to support their program. Subscribers, including students, family and anyone with an interest in a specific high school or athlete can watch events live or on-demand.

The number of subscribers continues to grow and additional revenue models are being developed. These include monetizing AI-generated short-form content, and advertising utilizing integrated ad servers, pre-rolls, mid rolls and banners.

OUTCOME

Overcoming the cost and labor concerns of high school sports directors, The NFHS Network has already installed over 14,000 Pixellot automatic production systems in 8,896 schools across the country. Thanks to this deployment, the NFHS Network is now producing over a million games
annually. And with the direct-to-consumer subscription model, more games getting produced means the greater the opportunity for more users to join the network and generate new revenue streams for the schools.

Schools are increasingly connecting with their fan base and getting greater community exposure. This is key to the democratization of sports and leveling the playing field for smaller sports programs to be empowered to generate revenue and media exposure, just like the bigger schools.

RAPID GROWTH

In March 2019 Pixellot and PlayOn! Sports signed a new seven-year contract. The extended agreement anticipates more than 20,000 installations over the next few years, with a goal of more than 1 million live event broadcasts per year.

Mark Koski – CEO NFHS Network

“The Pixellot partnership allowed us to increase the live events broadcast per school from 20 to +100 per season and helped us expand our target market from 20% of schools to 100%. The best thing about the technology is that once the unit is installed and games are scheduled – it just works!”

Dr. Steven Craft – Fulton County Athletic Director

“in a perfect world, people would be able to come to every game, but we don’t live in that world and people have to pick and choose. This technology allows us to provide this resource to them”

Pixellot pioneered the concept of automated video production. Today we are the market-leading AI-based end-to-end sports content creation and distribution solution! With Pixellot AI-Automated Production, professional and amateur sports organizations can now affordably monetize sports events.