Magnifi Embraces Generative AI to Drive Sports Highlights Content Creation in New Ways

New automated tools can help satiate content needs for hardcore fans but also educate (and create) new fans

The T20 Cricket World Cup is heading to the United States in a little more than two months and for U.S. sports fans who like to pride themselves on understanding all the top events taking place in the U.S., it’s time to get cracking on understanding the ins and outs of cricket. But the challenge is twofold: first finding out where to look for things like condensed games and highlights but also, from the content creator standpoint, easily creating content for fans who may be just learning about the game. That’s where Magnifi, with its ability to easily condense cricket matches into digestible pieces, is looking to help.

Meghna Krishna, Magnifi, CRO, says to look for more enhancements in the company’s offerings at the NAB show later this month.

“Somebody who does not understand cricket does not want to sit in front of the television for 4 hours trying to understand the game,” says Meghna Krishna, Magnifi, chief revenue officer. “What we try to do is offer  shortened version, which is a more Gen. Z version of the game with key moments.”

Topping the list of product offerings is Digital Highlights Pro which Magnifi says enables seamless creation, personalization, and auto-publishing of bite-sized videos across all platforms. The Magnifi system works by taking the digital stream of a match (usually an RTMP and HLS stream) and then passing it through a series of algorithms and AI tools to identify famous players and the type of play that occurred. Those tags take cues from sports mechanics, observing crowd responses, and using activity recognition to determine key moments and highlights in less than 60 seconds. The end result is more sports content and highlights in more places reaching more fans.

Magnifi’s architecture is can take metadata and statistics and use it to drive faster content creation.

“The data is attributed to a clip, for example, [Indian cricket star] Virat Kohi hitting a six, and then matched with data for the stadium, teams, date, and then who was the player who was bowling as well as the fielders,” she adds. “And then the clip is created along with a small data feed that can later be used to pull the clip out and serve it out to [different audiences].”

Looking at nearly every major professional sport it is pretty clear that creating content designed to help novices better understand a given sport or game is not a high priority. That can be due to two things: a sense that the responsibility lies with other entities (youth leagues and rights holders) and also that the costs are, still, too high. But Krishna says Magnifi can amplify content in new ways.

“There are a lot of things we are exploring with content creation like who was the best batsman in the world, what was their technique, and then can we study their technique,” “It’s all about storytelling and creating more content faster,” she says.  she says.

Generative AI is also continuing to play a larger role with Magnifi’s services, making it easier to drill into an archive but give designers and editors more tools to create more dynamic content.

“Whether it’s through voice commands, better editing tools, a larger repository of graphics, or making it easier to create vertical video [with our Auto-Flip software] it’s all about storytelling and creating more content faster,” she says.