For decades, content production scale was a function of budget. The richest leagues and clubs could produce more, faster, and better. That era is ending.
Bob Carney, the NBA's SVP of Digital and Social Content, describes what's now possible. "A few minutes after each game, you will see a three-minute game recap on the NBA's app in French, Spanish, and Portuguese." But it's not just dubbing — it's the entire workflow that's automated. "It's analyzing the entire game, writing a script in English, taking that script, translating the script in a number of different languages, then doing an automated narration in all the different languages, then compiling the highlights, then cropping it, marrying it all together for our team to then publish."
The NBA is also producing a daily 30-minute highlight show called "NBA Rundown" that's ready "two hours after the last game ended." As Carney noted on the stage at the WSC Sports Madrid Huddle, "It's not only the video, it's the graphics, the dynamic graphics, the sidebar that goes with it. It has press conferences and interviews and top stats and top dressers and storytelling can really be adjusted to what you want to do."
Also at the WSC Huddle, John Barbarotta, Senior Director of Digital Content at ESPN, spoke about the next wave of AI: "Don't be afraid to fully embrace AI and automation as core accelerators of content production. Most AI is only as strong as the prompts, systems, and editorial judgment behind it, meaning humans remain essential to shaping, training, and elevating what these tools can do.” Importantly, he added, "the organizations that blend human creativity with scaled automation should unlock massive gains in speed, relevance, and output." This is something that Barbarotta reiterated in The 2025 WSC Sports Fan Engagement Study on How Gen X, Y, and Z Are Redefining Sports Fandom.
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Jared Hoffman, Content Creator and Executive at Warrior Media, also gave his thoughts on how the industry is poised to change: "The critical trend is the lowering cost of content creation and the increasing skill level of native content creators. I think we are increasingly getting into a world where teams themselves will have leverage over their leagues, especially the big teams. There are more and more cost-effective ways for teams to produce and monetize themselves rather than needing the heft of a larger league to help them do so. The cost of creating your own clips, highlights, and insights used to be so prohibitively expensive that you needed a third party to take the risks, but now that barrier is gone."
For smaller organizations, this is transformative. "It used to be that smaller leagues and organizations did not have the resources to match the scale of content operations bigger organizations had," says Lina Gustafson of HockeyAllsvenskan, "but more and more we see the technology is making that possible."
Jaume Pons of LALIGA framed it as fan-driven innovation: "We know fans' expectations for a more immersive and personalized experience mean we always have to keep innovating. Fans are demanding, and the technology will have to keep up — and as soon as it does, sports organizations are always right there to use it. Cause fans don't want to wait. If fans want it, then there is business related, so the solution will follow."
But technology isn't replacing humans; it's enabling them to do more. Alessandro Reitano of Sky Deutschland pushed back on the automation-as-replacement narrative: "I was talking to my team recently and I was talking about when we started working with WSC Sports back in 2014. My team has tripled in size since then. People think that AI will replace people, but it's just creating more opportunities. It's creating so much more work. It's creating a bigger business for us."
Think of like Moneyball: Yes, having a bigger budget is great. But the democratization of smart strategies brings everyone closer. In 2026, organizational size and budget matter less than willingness to adopt new tools. A mid-tier club with good technology partners can now produce at scale that would have required a top-five league's resources until not too long ago. The question isn't whether your organization is big enough to compete. It's whether you're moving fast enough to leverage what's now possible.
To get more content like this, check out the next and final chapter in this series, The Overlooked Opportunity — Casual Fans.
