How AI is Enhancing Engagement for the Mountain West Conference
Founded in 1999, the Mountain West (MW) is a dynamic intercollegiate athletics conference spanning a diverse geographic region of the US, from Las Vegas through the Rocky Mountains to Hawaii in the Pacific. MW hosts a wide range of sports, including football, baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, track and field, and more, and has earned a deserved reputation for innovation in collegiate sports broadcasting. Innovations like Referee Access, which allows fans to view the same replay footage and watch referees make decisions in real-time, have significantly boosted viewer engagement.
Like sports rights holders worldwide, the MW observed a notable increase in demand for content. Therefore, it sought a solution to cost-effectively cover, edit, and curate multiple sports and events simultaneously for its audience, all while enhancing engagement. However, the organization faced significant challenges in achieving this goal.
The first challenge stemmed from X’s (formerly Twitter’s) shift from a free to a paid model for LiveCuts, which disrupted MW’s preferred workflow for sharing content on social platforms and generating automatic highlights, adding new financial constraints. Many broadcasters have faced similar obstacles as X has moved toward a more aggressive monetization strategy. The second challenge was MW’s rapid growth; its success drove demand for swift highlight production, requiring quick turnaround for up to eight games and processing of approximately 20 games in a single day at scale.
Automating systems
Following a thorough market review, MW implemented a solution from Magnifi, which introduced a range of features that transformed its operations. Leveraging AI-powered tools, MW automated the creation, editing, and distribution of game highlights and social media content, providing the flexibility and scalability needed without incurring extra costs. This automation allowed a small team to manage high volumes of gameday content, delivering timely, relevant updates across various sports to an eager audience.
In the past, this process was labor-intensive and challenging, especially when producing and publishing content at scale in real-time to boost engagement. Handling multiple concurrent sports meant navigating complexities like aspect ratios, platform-specific requirements, personalization, and device compatibility—all essential for delivering a seamless, low-latency experience to an engaged viewership.
Key features of the Magnifi solution included automated highlight generation for all sports covered by the MW Conference, intuitive video editing, streamlined workflows, auto-publishing across social platforms, and scalable production capabilities, all aimed at enhancing viewer engagement and satisfaction.
Furthermore, the Magnifi team was able to customize its solution to MW’s specific demands. These included the ability to create highlight packages with clips from multiple games and concurrent streams with music, bumpers and overlays; refining its ball-tracking abilities on MW content to offer bulk-auto flip and generate higher-quality content in the vertical format, batch publishing to socials, and the ability to integrate multiple social accounts.
Detailed analytics are a core part of the Magnifi solution, enabling MW to track content performance and adapt strategies for continuous improvement in viewership and engagement. This data-driven approach has facilitated more targeted content sharing on specific platforms, yielding impressive results. Over an initial six-month period, YouTube minutes watched increased by 139%, reaching 1.6 million, while view counts rose by 148%. Similarly, Facebook views surged by 151% from late 2022 to late 2023.
“The platform performs well across all of our sports, but I have been most impressed with the coverage in cross country and track and field,” says Justin Packard, Director of Digital & Social Media at The Mountain West. “The AI system identifies key race moments—like lead changes and standout performances. For field events, it clips each attempt, so by the end of the day, I can quickly locate the gold-medal highlights to share on social media, posting directly from Magnifi to our accounts.”
Seamless growth
The ability to establish a seamless workflow that covers the automated generation of highlights packages and more, as well as to then populate active social channels with the content in a timely manner has played a key part in the growth of the MW’s D2C offering. Such systems are an important part of the overall picture if sports rights holders want to maintain the growth that the democratization of production has started.
Sports broadcasting is no longer limited to large, expensive OB operations. However, the time-intensive task of clipping and repurposing content for various platforms has often hindered rights holders from maximizing their content’s value. AI and automation are set to play a transformative role in addressing this challenge. This technology enables rights holders—from collegiate conferences and lower-tier federations to national broadcasters—to efficiently engage audiences across platforms, delivering relevant content swiftly and affordably, no matter where or on what device fans are watching.
