Summary
As the leading U.S. stock car racing organization, NASCAR oversees the beloved Cup Series featuring the legendary Daytona 500 – the crown jewel event marking the height of NASCAR’s commercial success and cultural influence.
Behind NASCAR’s heart-pounding racing action lies a dedicated content and digital product team fixated on deepening fan engagement and creating the best experience for fans on race day. While drivers battle fiercely for the checkered flag, this crew is constantly experimenting with cutting-edge technologies to immerse fans like never before.
Since 2020, WSC Sports’ AI-powered platform has been a key piece of this puzzle, helping NASCAR upgrade the speed and scale of its content output, providing fans with hundreds of highlights per race from everything that happens on the track, including in-car driver camera footage.
Gearing up for the highly-anticipated 2023 season, NASCAR set about revamping its offerings for fans across its mobile app, aiming to significantly reduce the time taken to feature highlights to the app’s Timeline Race Feed after the action happens on the track. The results have been transformative—a surge of race highlights that brings fans closer to the action and accelerates the growth of NASCAR’s industry-leading app.
The Challenge: Quickly Delivering Highlights to the NASCAR App
The Timeline Feed within the NASCAR app is the top destination for complete race-day information and must-see content. For the highly anticipated 2023 season, NASCAR’s digital team wanted to leverage WSC Sports’ technology to deliver best-in-class race coverage and bolster two key areas of the fan experience: creating more content, including new types of highlights, and delivering them to fans faster than ever before.
Previously, highlights were delayed 15-20 minutes in the app because the digital team would source race content from NASCAR.com, and then tag and edit each video before manually uploading them to the app. Because of these bottlenecks, the Timeline feed only featured a few race actions, but not other important moments like passes, crashes and more.
To provide fans the real-time, easy access they craved, NASCAR needed to increase the amount of content published on the Timeline feed and dramatically shorten the time gap between capturing highlights and fans consuming them in the app.
Solution: Using AI to Automate Content Creation and Publishing
Since 2020, NASCAR has used WSC’s AI-powered automation technology to replace its manual editing efforts and supercharge the speed and scale of its content output. With WSC Sports, the NASCAR team can automatically generate real-time race highlights such as start sequences, crashes, restarts, and finishes and seamlessly distribute these on social platforms, including YouTube, X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Discord, as well as on NASCAR.com.
During 2023 NASCAR developed an app integration with WSC Sports to improve the delivery of highlights to the race Timeline feed. Whereas publishing content to the NASCAR app originally took 15-20 minutes, highlights are now published to the app’s Race Feed in just a few minutes.
This automation allows NASCAR to focus less on content creation and more on how to use content most effectively, providing fans with exactly what they want to see when they want to see it.
Results
To generate content for all their digital properties, during the complete 2023 race season, NASCAR used the WSC Sports platform to ingest more than 3,500 race event streams to create:
- 13,000+ Videos
- 170+ Videos per race on average — 65% growth YoY
Since utilizing WSC Sports to revamp the in-app Timeline, for the final 12 Cup Series races of 2023, NASCAR was able to:
Takeaways
The NASCAR Race Timeline offers both casual and diehard fans alike the ultimate race day experience. Thanks to WSC Sports, NASCAR now publishes substantially more event highlights in significantly less time, serving up all the important action from the starting line to victory lane.
Using WSC Sports, NASCAR has minimized manual bottlenecks, boosted revenue via pre-roll ads and most importantly, elevated the fan experience on the NASCAR app.
By increasing the speed and scale of its highlight creation, NASCAR provides fans seamless on-demand access to real-time race content, serving more types of content than before, ensuring that the Timeline feed remains the number one place for fans to consume everything they need on race days.
