The Israeli Basketball Association is enlisting Pixellot’s artificial intelligence technology to stream an equal amount of its men’s and women’s basketball games across eight separate leagues.
Through the partnership, Pixellot’s automated game streams can be viewed on the IBBA’s basketball platform, and Pixellot will also simultaneously become an official sponsor of the Israeli youth basketball leagues. Pixellot’s unmanned cameras automatically track player and ball movement, allowing the company to produce and disseminate as many as 150,000 games per month across over 70 countries.
Pixellot most recently expanded its sports video production technology throughout Canada after striking an August deal with the streaming app HomeTeam Live. But this new deal with the IBBA is closer to home for the Israel-based company and purportedly makes the IBBA the first basketball league to broadcast men's and women's leagues equitably.
Pixellot raised $161 million at a $500 million valuation earlier this year to move into Asia and Latin America and has spent much of the past two years developing Pixellot YOU, an AI platform that uses machine learning to record youth games and practices and then distribute automated highlights.
The IBBA has also made youth basketball a priority, particularly for female players. The league has 50 Israeli women’s and girls’ teams and, in recent years, has routinely televised women’s national and first division games on OTT platforms. Overall, the IBBA has 2,360 teams and 35,000 female and male players.
In Europe, FC Barcelona has also capitalized on Pixellot game streams. In the U.S., the NBA and MLB utilize Pixellot technology to livestream youth and college-centric events, while ESPN, Genius Sports, NBC’s SportsEngine and the National Federation of State High School Association have been Pixellot partners.
