FIBA 3x3
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How WSC Sports Enabled FIBA 3×3 to Cover Simultaneous Events Across Continents Without Missing a Play
Summary
Hoopers of all ages have been playing three-on-three basketball since the ‘80s, forming impromptu pickup games when only a half court was available. In 2010, FIBA, the world governing body of basketball, decided to take the game from black tops all over the world and organize it into a full-fledged professional sport. In just under a decade, FIBA 3×3 has become a fixture in the Summer Olympics and has attracted top-tier professional 3×3 talent to events in over one hundred cities around the world.
The most important competition of the year is the annual FIBA 3×3 World Cup, featuring the top 20 men’s and women’s teams in the world, respectively, and the FIBA 3×3 World Tour Final, the culminating event of the 3×3 professional circuit. With such a hectic schedule, the task at hand for the league’s content team wasn’t exactly a layup.
Their primary focus was to raise awareness around the new basketball discipline and build a loyal fanbase. To do that, they needed a solution in place to take all of the incredible action from games—many oftentimes taking place simultaneously on different continents—and deliver it to fans all over the world.
KEY RESULTS
- 150M+ social media views
- 10K videos published
- 3.5K+ games covered
The 2023 FIBA 3×3 Season included over 170 events during the year, including senior, U23, U18, and U17 divisions, in addition to the women’s circuit.
The Challenge
So Many Events, So Little Time
With so many events happening at the same time, the process of capturing game highlights, editing, and then distributing them to FIBA 3×3’s social media pages, website, and broadcast partners became unsustainable.
The digital team relied on an army of freelance video editors based all over the world, so just managing the team and receiving the content in an orderly fashion was a challenge.
Catering to Different Fan Types
The reach of FIBA 3×3 is simply huge, with over 150M households tuning in to games from over 100 countries. Having such a diverse audience means that the preferences of fans vary from one country to the next—especially when it comes to subject matter and language. Fans want to consume content that features their favorite players, with commentary and text that resonates with them.
The digital team at 3×3 wanted to control these elements and distribute content to targeted audiences. But with no solution and a whirlwind of content coming in from events all over the world, they lacked the technical capability to deliver quality, short-form content to their fans.
The Solution
Scaling Content
In 2021, FIBA 3×3’s digital team adopted the WSC Sports platform to create and distribute more content and enhance event coverage. Streams are ingested into the platform, where every moment is analyzed, tagged, and indexed, enabling the team to create a host of different types of content—like top plays, recaps, and matchups, in just a few clicks. Now the digital team can manage their massive amount of content and seamlessly publish to all of 3×3’s digital channels, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and the FIBA 3×3 website.
Adding a Personal Touch
Within the platform, the team can search and filter videos by a variety of variables, including specific teams, players, countries, and broadcast languages. The ability to easily find and segment the content they’re looking for enables them to add the personal touch they wanted. So if, for example, a Serbian team or player is performing well, the digital team can send that to a targeted Serbian audience to build some hype around the team.
To elevate their content even further, 3×3’s digital team makes a point of embracing the crossover between basketball and hip-hop—a mainstay in basketball culture all over the world, but something that varies depending on the city and country. That extra layer of local knowledge allows them to add-in text and commentary that really hits home for fans.
Distribution
Once a game ends, it’s the digital team’s responsibility to distribute highlights to multiple internal and external stakeholders. In addition to promoting content on their own channels, the league provides highlights to its broadcast partners to share across their linear and digital channels. They also serve other partners—like high schools and universities attended by some of FIBA 3×3’s younger players—so that the schools can build buzz on their platforms.
Players are also provided with their own highlights so that they can share them with their audiences—some numbering in the tens to hundreds of thousands of followers, including former NBA player and NCAA Player of the Year, Jimmer Fredette, and current LSU standout Hailey Van Lith. Even referees have approached the digital team for footage, preferring to review their performances using shortened game recaps created by the WSC Sports platform to raw streams.
All content packages are now delivered to partners automatically, removing any need for manually downloading videos, attaching them, and sending via email.
Takeaways
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Harnessing the Power of AI
The collaboration between FIBA 3×3 and WSC Sports demonstrates the power of AI, its ability to help teams create content at unprecedented speed and scale, and deliver it to a massive audience.
WSC Sports also enables them to share content across multiple digital channels, that is personalized and formatted for any platform and any device. The sheer volume of content created from all of 3×3’s events is simply impossible to manage without automation.
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Every Highlight Captured
With WSC Sports, 3×3’s digital team has peace of mind knowing that every exciting play from every event is being captured, using AI to make sure nothing is missed.
Unburdened by the heavy workload of manual editing, the team has more time to do what they do best—create more great content. The proof is in the numbers. Bleachers are more crowded at events, and 3×3’s following continues to grow and get more notoriety on digital.
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FIBA 3X3 World Cup
Vienna, Austria, hosted the 2023 FIBA 3×3 World Cup. In terms of audience size, it was the league’s biggest event ever, attracting 27 broadcasters in over 48 countries and territories and streaming across 3×3’s digital platforms.
The Serbian men’s team and USA women’s team were crowned champions, but there was another victory being celebrated back at 3×3 headquarters in Switzerland—a massive win on the digital front in terms of fan engagement and exposure.
