How much is a dunk worth? Two points.
But what about the video of that slam? Well, more and more every day.
Roughly 40% of NBA team revenues this year are coming from national and local TV deals. But the value doesn’t end there. Team-captured content increasingly fuels social media growth, where shortform video is king, as well as sponsorship activations and in-arena presentations between breaks in live action.
The shelf life of videos in sports has always been short, and it might be shorter than ever now. However sports entities are finding ways to spread each video onto more shelves.
“We’ve continued to increase the volume of content we capture each year to meet growing demand,” Brooklyn Nets VP, content Charlie Widdoes said. “The difference now is the breadth of how that footage is used.”
The Nets have put a particular emphasis on TikTok, where they’ve racked up more likes than the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors combined. Brooklyn is also one of several franchises that have centralized video storage, search and distribution workflows through ScorePlay, a startup founded in France, headquartered in New York and growing in the NBA. ScorePlay says it is currently working with seven NBA teams, with eyes on inking a third of the league by the end of the season.
The company raised $13 million in 2025, with buy-in from Giannis Antetokounmpo, Alex Morgan, Kevin Durant’s 35V and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six VC fund.
As the regional sports network model wobbles, the Portland Trail Blazers, Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards have each taken media production efforts in-house, from TikTok to TV. Turmoil at Main Street Sports Group, which operates the FanDuel Sports Network RSNs, could lead more teams to do the same.
But even for franchises like Brooklyn, which continues to work with YES Network, the amount of video being captured for other needs created problems. Storage limitations were the first thing that led Nets parent company BSE Global to explore cloud-based options, before recognizing the additional benefits of a platform that would allow different departments within the organization to use video assets for their own purposes. BSE said 600 stakeholders now have access to its ScorePlay-stored assets.
Moving to one system also enabled BSE to streamline processes with different teams across the building—including work associated with the Nets, the WNBA’s New York Liberty and the Barclays Center venue itself—while also increasingly tapping players as their own distribution channels.
Ohanian was looking for a similar set of solutions soon after launching the NWSL’s Angel City FC, which debuted in 2022.
“My head of marketing is showing me what is considered the best-in-class software for managing photos and videos, and I refused to believe that this was actually the best product,” he said. “It was so offensive and bad.”
He initially considered building his own video management platform before coming across ScorePlay, which was primarily working with soccer clubs in France at the time. He later brought the tool to his TGL team and track league Athlos. “ScorePlay is the central nervous system,” Ohanian said of Athlos, where event staffers send videos to celebrity visitors in real-time, produce edits for the race’s stream, distribute highlights on social media and push yet more video to sponsors.
Artificial intelligence-based person identification and event tagging will make the centralized database of video footage even more powerful, Ohanian said. He envisions a not-too-distant future where fans leaving an event are greeted with a phone notification and a folder of images of themselves enjoying the action, plus possibly the night’s biggest highlights.
From there, the clips could go anywhere.