NASCAR
CASE STUDY

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Fast Cars, Faster Highlights: How NASCAR Uses AI to Deliver Real-Time Content

 

Summary

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.

KEY RESULTS

  • 13K video created
  • 170+ videos per race
  • 65% more content YoY
  • 80% faster content delivery to NASCAR app

During the 2023 race season, NASCAR used the WSC Sports platform to ingest more than 3,500 race event streams, automatically generating content for all their digital properties at speed and scale.

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.

NASCAR race with crowd in the background.

The Solution

Using AI to Automate Content Creation and Publishing

Since 2020, NASCAR has used WSC Sports’ 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.

Takeaways

  • Faster Delivery

    Since using WSC Sports to revamp the Timeline Feed, NASCAR was able to populate race highlights in the app timeline 80% faster.

    NASCAR takeaway
  • More Race Content

    NASCAR is now able to able to publish more than double the number of videos featured on the race timeline.

    This substantial increase serves up all the important action from the starting line to the victory lane.

    NASCAR TAKEAWAY
  • Elevated Fan Experience

    By increasing the speed and scale of 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.

    NASCAR takeaway

If something just happened on the track, we wanted fans to see a replay of it immediately, and WSC lets us do just that. We’ve also fine-tuned the NASCAR App user experience by delivering content to fans exactly where and when they want to see it.”

The value of WSC Sports was clear to see early on in our partnership, so naturally we’ve increased our scope of work together ahead of each race season. But, we’re still only getting started in this collaboration, so fans can expect a lot more exciting content experiences in 2024 and beyond.”