Daniel Shichman and the second life of a game

Daniel Shichman was watching the 2013 NBA Finals when Dwyane Wade made a block he wanted to see again. Finding a decent clip proved harder than it should have. The version he located on YouTube was pirated and poor quality. A satisfying basketball moment had become an unsatisfying internet errand.

For a fan, that was irritating. For an engineer already working on sports video, it was a useful problem. The footage existed. The audience existed. The route between them needed work.

Shichman and his friends had been developing basketball scouting technology. The highlights opportunity gave their company, WSC Sports, a wider audience to serve. Coaches needed to study games; fans wanted to revisit them. The same raw material could support rather different businesses.

Four friends, one shared appetite

Shichman’s professional preparation began at Tel Aviv University, where he studied electrical engineering and later completed an MBA. He worked in wireless telecommunications and project management during his military service. An early company biography describes six years spent on telecommunications systems and major projects.

These are useful credentials for someone entering a business where video has to arrive, be understood, and leave again quickly. They also suggest a less glamorous starting point than the sports industry’s public face. Before the highlights come the systems that make footage usable.

The group around him included Aviv Arnon, Hy Gal, and Shmulik Yoffe. Their friendship preceded the company. In Shichman’s telling, the wish to build something together preceded any polished startup strategy. He described the founders with a compact introduction: “We’re geeks.” It has the advantage of leaving very little room for a motivational poster.

There was sporting experience as well as technical experience. Shichman played basketball in high school. The founding team combined an interest in the games with the practical habit of asking what software could do with their video.

A Microsoft accelerator followed in 2012. By then, the task was becoming more specific: find a way for sports footage to serve more people, more quickly, without requiring a separate manual edit for every request. Shared enthusiasm had given the team a starting point. Customers would determine whether it had a business.

A whole game, many different requests

WSC’s early proposition was unusually easy for a sports fan to understand. A broadcaster might have the full game. Someone else might want every scoring moment by a particular player. A league might need a short package for social media and a different version for its website. Each request asks an editor to revisit the same material.

The platform automates that work by analyzing broadcasts and assembling customized video. By 2016, WSC was describing a workflow that ran from ingesting live content to distributing short clips, with the NBA, BT Sport, and other sports organizations among its partners.

This was a business serving media rights owners. It helped organizations make more use of footage they controlled. That position matters: Shichman’s company could build the machinery around a sports moment without having to own the competition that produced it.

Personalization made the idea more interesting than a faster recap. A national audience may care particularly about an athlete from its own country. A supporter may follow a player more closely than a team. The broadcast is shared, while the reasons for watching it are wonderfully uneven.

The dream customer has committees

Working with the NBA brought Shichman close to a league he loved. It also supplied an education in operating a company. Large sports organizations make decisions through approvals, departments, and detailed responsibilities. The excitement visible on court has a considerable administrative staff behind it.

Shichman has described learning to respect that precision. Tasks that initially looked overstaffed made more sense once he understood how carefully responsibilities were divided. A glamorous customer still needs a dependable supplier.

There was another difficulty: deciding what to build. An NBA request could point toward a feature useful to many customers, or toward a detour. He acknowledged that being a fan could make those decisions harder.

The pressure became concrete during a project involving Nike’s NFC-enabled NBA jerseys. WSC’s part included player-specific GIFs and videos. The company was also changing its basketball infrastructure, so both efforts had to progress together. Preseason testing and last-minute fixes met the immovable opening of the season. The schedule belonged to basketball.

For a founder, that is a more useful picture than the familiar image of shaking hands with a famous client. Success creates obligations. A relationship worth winning becomes a relationship worth being ready for, every time the game starts.

Teaching software what counts

“Every sport is different,” Shichman explained in 2021. It is an obvious observation until someone asks a computer to understand one. A basketball shot, a football pass, and a tennis rally supply different visual and audio problems. A general appreciation of excitement will only get software so far.

WSC used multiple models to analyze different sports, identifying events and working out where a usable clip should begin and end. Shichman described supervised learning, with data collected or supplied by clients to train neural networks for particular tasks.

His concern was the distance between demonstrating an idea and making it dependable across a large volume of games. An occasional successful detection is a demonstration. Professional customers need repeated accuracy. By 2021, WSC said it was analyzing more than 100,000 games annually.

That year, the company won SVG Europe’s award for Outstanding OTT Experience. The recognition belonged to the company’s automated sports highlights technology. It also marked the less visible engineering work beneath an experience designed to feel immediate.

When thirteen people sounded like enough

Early on, Shichman recalled noticing another company with 13 employees and thinking a team that size could do anything. It is a charming estimate of the amount of work the world contains. The world subsequently provided a correction.

In February 2022, WSC announced a $100 million Series D led by ION Crossover Partners. The stated uses included expanding products and recruiting more than 150 employees that year. Funding offered room to pursue a larger operation; it also made the operating brief larger.

WSC entered 2024 with 450 employees, a presence in seven countries, and more than 450 sports organization partners. In 2023 alone it had added over 150 clients, including ATP Media, Sky, and Tottenham Hotspur. New offices in New York and Tel Aviv accompanied that expansion.

Shichman’s retrospective on 2023 acknowledged that a larger company made big projects more challenging. The early arithmetic of four friends had given way to coordinating an organization. The product might remove work from a customer’s desk while creating a good deal of work on his own.

“We feel it’s the beginning of a journey.”

Daniel Shichman, February 2024

The footage outside the scoreboard

By the 2024 rebrand, Shichman was discussing more than automated game highlights. WSC’s offering included In-App Stories, bringing vertical video experiences into rights holders’ own mobile apps, and a Discovery Network for distributing content through agreed third-party properties.

Another product, Around the Game, addressed material surrounding the competition: interviews, player arrivals, fan reactions, press conferences, and studio shows. Making those assets searchable and organized could help content teams assemble stories from several kinds of footage.

That is a natural extension of the original problem. A useful sports story may need the play and the explanation afterward. Finding both should be easier than rummaging through separate cupboards.

Shichman also described a Gen-AI team and multilingual voice-over work. These plans broadened the company’s role in production, while leaving content teams with decisions about what they wanted to say. A system can offer more pieces to work with. The choice of story remains consequential.

The next job for the highlight

In January 2026, WSC acquired Partnerbrite, adding sponsorship campaign execution and audience activation to its platform. The acquisition connected content work with a commercial task often handled elsewhere. A clip could now sit closer to the process of putting a sponsor’s campaign into motion.

The following month, Shichman outlined a sports media model linking content, audience signals, and revenue decisions. His ambition was a continuous system in which the response to one moment could inform the next. That is a stated direction for the business, with its usefulness to be measured in customers’ daily work.

July brought a TikTok partnership. WSC described providing creators with licensed footage, AI editing tools, and editorial guidance, while rights holders retained control of usage. The arrangement added another route between the organization holding the video and the people who might enjoy it.

Across these changes, the practical question remains recognizable: where should a sports moment go after it happens? Shichman began with the inconvenience of finding something worth watching again. He now runs a company addressing the many tasks that follow.

The game supplies the action. Fans supply their attachments, preferences, and very specific demands. Somewhere between the two, there is still a person asking to see that block one more time.