Stephen Curry goes off for a scintillating 28 points in the third quarter of a game and Kobe Bryant finally breaks out of his shooting woes to notch a season-high 31 points.
Each feat occurred on the same day in the National Basketball Association last week. To make sure that they satiate their highlight-hungry fan base, the league has introduced a partnership with WSC Sports Technologies to pump out highlights in a matter of minutes.
How? Well, Sports Illustrated reports that the NBA is using what's called an Automatic Video Generator, which pinpoints specific play actions in real-time using audio, video and archived data.
There are specific sets of actions that trigger it into motion. For example, anytime a player scores 20 points, his performance is instantly archived into a highlight reel.
SI says the NBA generated 600 sets of such rules per night. Once a highlight occurs — whether it's a riveting slam dunk or marksman-like three-point shooting — clips are generated within minutes and can be published directly to social media networks via videos or gifs, thanks to Clipro, the cloud-based video editor that the league is utilizing.
The NBA gave WSC's technology a test run last season in its Development League and now works with 18 of the league's 30 teams. This Automatic Video Generator will allow the NBA to pinpoint where a specific player is popular around the world by the number of clicks and views of each clip.
All the effort is worth it, considering the NBA churns out some of the best highlights in sports on a nightly basis and has already reported 4.2 billion video views on NBA.com and NBA mobile last season, according to SI.
So, whether you're watching a game and see a highlight that you want to watch again or are on Twitter and a mention of a dazzling play hits your timeline, chances are it will be available to you in minutes.
