As the National Basketball Association (NBA) opens another season, the league is expanding the way it works with creators to grow and popularize basketball.
It’s brought on top influencers such as Twitch streamer Kai Cenat and TikTokker Drew Afualo to mark the start of the 2024-25 season in a glossy trailer, running another edition of its five-versus-five celebrity creator tournament, the Creator Cup Series — and crucially, granting a coterie of creators access to tens of thousands of hours of basketball game footage.
Other sports leagues and organizations such as the PGA and NWSL have recently ramped up their engagement with the creator sector, while the NFL launched a similar initiative last year.
Game footage is typically a preserve of broadcasters, and without the means or funds to license clips, sports creators have instead looked to explore new formats such as “watchalongs,” in which users follow as creators narrate and comment on a game in real time without showing live footage.
Since 2016 the NBA had granted access to five minutes per game — equal to 50 hours a season. Now, it’s providing creators with 25,000 hours of game footage spanning the last 10 years in basketball, from 2014 to the 2023-24 season, plus an additional 2,500 hours for the current season.
“The idea here is that if we can empower a very select group on YouTube, it’s going to help us reach new fans globally,” said Bob Carney, svp social and digital content at the NBA. “These creators will become like an extension of the league.” The NBA didn’t say whether creators would be able to use the footage on platforms other than YouTube.
The NBA commissioned an AI software firm, WSC Sports, to index the footage in a way that allows editors to search and select specific plays across the library, which also includes footage of pre and post-game analysis and press conferences as originally broadcast. The NBA is also providing them access to WSC’s AI-enabled video editing suite, according to Carney. Financial terms were not made available.
