PSA delivers live streams and AI-powered highlights across OTT, social and digital using Grabyo
The Professional Squash Association (PSA) is the global governing body responsible for the administration of both men’s and women’s professional squash around the world.
With more than 1,000 events taking place around the globe every year, the PSA Squash Tour showcases the game of squash at its highest level in some of the world’s most unique and stunning locations.
PSA’s media team also manages and supports the communications and social media channels of various partners.
During the 2024-25 season, over 30 of the sport’s biggest tournaments will be broadcast live on PSA’s owned and operated OTT platform, SQUASHTV, which also includes extended highlights packages and VOD content.
A long-term customer of Grabyo, PSA uses a number of our live production, clipping and editing tools to power its video output and promote the sport to a global audience.
The Opportunity
Ahead of the LA28 Olympic Games, which will see squash included as a discipline for the first time, the PSA is evolving its digital content and distribution strategy to capitalize on a huge moment for the sport.
With a modest-sized media team, PSA continually innovates its workflows to service every platform with live content and it will be working to execute a wide-ranging content strategy in the lead up to LA28.
To achieve these aims, PSA scaled its use of Grabyo, leveraging a number of recent upgrades to our platform including AI logging and automated highlights, powered by Magnifi.
The Workflow
For every live tournament or event, five on-site crew members typically manage PSA’s live broadcast output. The broadcast team set up cameras, vision mixing equipment and encoders to produce a stream that is transported back to London for distribution – the pre-mixed feed is then sent to affiliate broadcasters and Grabyo.
Between 1-3 other crew members, from PSA’s social team, are also on site to create agile video, photo and written social content.
Away from the venue, other members of the social team remotely create live streams, real-time clips and highlights using Grabyo.
Multi-stream live clipping with AI-powered logging
Using our live clipping and publishing tools, PSA’s Grabyo operators are able to manage all real-time clipping and social video distribution during tournaments. This is usually done either on site from various locations around the world or remotely from PSA’s office based in Leeds.
The operators use our multi-stream live clipping functionality to monitor multiple matches at once in a single interface, clipping out moments as they happen.
When tournaments are played in time zones that aren’t UK-friendly, the on-site team will clip out moments while logging the DVR with markers and creating content for the UK team to leverage.
The workflow is also supported by our AI logging software, powered by Magnifi. Using computer vision and custom training, the AI engine detects key moments in live streams and drops identifying video markers in the DVR of the stream with rich metadata.
The team are then able to use these markers to create and publish clips instantly.
PSA’s operator uses this workflow to cover multiple matches at once and scale their output with minimal effort, all while retaining editorial control.
With the fast-paced nature of hosting tournaments, the on-site team and remote operators often need to carry out other content creation tasks, such as shooting content, writing updates and more – they can now do this without missing any important moments – AI covers the matches and logs important moments, so even away from their desk the operators will never miss anything.
This empowers the operator to ensure that clips are optimized and published to PSA’s and other partner’s social accounts across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and Threads, using our direct integration with every platform.
Content is also shared with sponsors and partners using our direct integration with Socialie, the content syndication platform. PSA’s social team sends video content into the Socialie platform directly from Grabyo, where affiliates and ambassadors can download and instantly share content from the tournament.
Human-centered AI highlights
PSA also creates extended highlights packages for matches using AI highlights powered by Magnifi and Grabyo.
To drive viewers to its OTT platform, SQUASHTV, and serve existing OTT customers with high-quality content, PSA creates multiple highlights formats, including circa five-minute packages for YouTube and circa 10-minute packages exclusively for SQUASHTV customers.
PSA’s editors download AI-curated highlights from the Grabyo and Magnifi platforms into an Adobe edit suite to craft engaging packages. These edits are then uploaded back to Grabyo for publishing to social.
Live streaming with monetization
PSA also uses live streaming to promote SQUASHTV. Offering premium content for free with drivers back to paid platforms is a tried and tested method of gaining subscribers or pay-per-view customers.
Using our restreaming tools, PSA delivers select matches live on YouTube, building in ad breaks for sponsors and branded graphics to drive viewers to SQUASHTV.
The Results
PSA has successfully implemented an AI-assisted live clipping and highlights workflow to scale its output and provide a backbone for implementing a wide-ranging content strategy ahead of LA 2028. This new workflow was used for the first time at the 2024 Egyptian Open in Cairo.
Its team are also testing new ways to leverage live content, using the versatility and flexibility of Grabyo Producer to create new live programming, such as smartphone-shot practice sessions live streamed to social media, using the Larix mobile app to encode and ingest video into Grabyo.
This also includes pre-match shows with a roaming presenter interviewing players and coaches around venues, with branded graphics and drivers to SQUASHTV, streamed to YouTube and Facebook.
“Grabyo has been a key tool used by our content and social teams for many years. Our usage has continually evolved to meet the changing needs of our audience and has allowed us to deliver more live and real-time content to all of our channels than ever before. The new AI workflow is powerful and gives us freedom to cover every key moment while allowing us to carry out other content creation tasks. We have peace of mind knowing that even when we’re busy, we don’t miss a thing, so neither will our audience.”
