Key Takeaways
- From minutes to moments: Social clips that once took 15–30 minutes now publish in seconds.
- Beyond broadcast: Automated highlights fuel TVNZ+ coverage, social content, paid media, and OOH out-of-home.
- Turning plays into promotion: Real-time delivery drives fans directly from the moment to the live game.
Cricket is a sport of moments, a decisive wicket, a game-changing boundary, a record-breaking milestone. But in today’s fast-moving sports media landscape, capturing and delivering those moments in time to make an impact isn’t easy.
For TVNZ, producing cricket highlights once meant hours of manual editing and long delays before fans could see the best plays. With the addition of WSC Sports’ AI-powered automation, that’s all changed. We spoke with the TVNZ team about how their workflow has evolved, what it means for their audience, and the surprising ways they’ve used real-time content to fuel marketing and engagement.
Q&A: How TVNZ Reimagined Cricket Content
Why did you need to change your content strategy?
We needed our content to match the expectations of modern sports fans, who demand highlights as soon as they happen, more variety in what they watch, and easy discovery and accessibility to that content. Cricket fans are no different, so it was important for TVNZ to redefine traditional cricket coverage and set a new standard in how events are covered in New Zealand.
Specifically we needed a way to create highlights faster and in more formats to fill our various social media accounts and owned and operated platforms. From 5-minute to 30-minute packages for TVNZ+, to social-first edits optimized for mobile, and that’s how WSC Sports fits in.
What was your content workflow before using WSC Sports?
The previous process was entirely manual. Editors had to select and cut every highlight package for TVNZ+. Creating a single social clip involved more than six steps — from finding the moment in our MAM (Media Asset Management), to clipping, rendering, re-editing, and manually posting. It could take up to 30 minutes, which meant fans often saw the content long after the excitement had passed. Now, WSC recommends key moments via a “star system” and delivers them instantly, ready to post.
How has automation changed your team’s day-to-day?
In a word scale. We’ve mentioned the lightning speed, which has been a game changer, but with an automated workflow we can now easily scale our output to make all different kinds of content, in different durations, ratios. For example, on TVNZ+, we can publish a range of videos like, all wickets, player highlights, short or extended team packages, with graphics and branding applied automatically.
What were your main goals & how did you measure success?
Reach was our key KPI. The goal was to get our cricket coverage in front of as many people as possible and convert that exposure into TVNZ+ and linear viewership.
Our initial goal with WSC Sports was simple: to improve our match highlights and assist our social media team. However, we quickly saw the potential of using the WSC Sports platform and the content it produces for additional marketing purposes, including user acquisition via Google Web Stories and integrated campaigns.
What’s something unique about TVNZ’s approach?
Cricket is defined by pivotal plays, a wicket, a boundary, but its slower pace can make sustaining attention harder. To solve this, working with WSC Sports and Dentsu Media, we created an ‘Excitement Index’ to predict and push those moments instantly.
With those same partners, we were able to publish clips within a minute across online and social, while also extending into paid media and OOH (out-of-home) campaigns — from airport billboards to office screens, making cricket coverage visible in places fans didn’t expect to see it.
At the same time, WSC Sports also creates our highlights in a 9×16 ratio and through an integration with Google we were able to publish these vertical videos as Web Stories which delivered.
Which WSC Sports feature made the biggest impact?
WSC Sports’ Magicrop feature is invaluable. It uses AI-powered ball tracking to perfectly frame cricket action for social formats. It’s a significant time-saver and ensures every clip is optimized for mobile viewing. Whether the video is 9:16, 4:5 or 1:1, Magicrop serves up a great highlight with none of the important action missing.
For a deeper dive into TVNZ's cricket content strategy, execution and results be sure to check out the full case study.
