AI Product BuildingAutomated Game Highlights (Project Clicker)
Turning live sports highlights into an automated content and revenue engine
Role
Product Strategy, Product Leadership, AI Solutions Architect
Industry
Media
Duration
3 Months
Services
Product Strategy, AI Product Building
Deliverables / Platform
Operational Workflow
CBS Sports | Product Strategy, Automation & MonetizationThe Context
CBS Sports invested heavily in the rights required to show live sports highlights across CBS Sports HQ, its free 24/7 streaming network. Those highlights were valuable, but once they aired, much of their digital potential was being left behind.
The same moments could power video across CBS Sports articles, game pages, scoreboards, mobile experiences, notifications and other digital surfaces. The problem was that extracting those clips from the live stream was almost entirely manual.
Producers and editors had to identify the moment, cut the video, upload it into the CMS, enter the appropriate information, and then associate the clip with the right teams, game and content experiences.
We already owned the rights and were already producing the content. The opportunity was to make every highlight work significantly harder.
The Problem
The biggest obstacle was metadata.
The live broadcast itself did not produce clips with all of the structured metadata our digital platforms needed. There was no simple identifier connecting a specific moment in the stream to a game ID, team, article, scoreboard or mobile experience.
Without that connection, scaling highlight distribution meant scaling people.
More games meant more editors. More clips meant more manual cutting. More destinations meant more manual association.
Rather than start by designing a technology solution, I wanted to understand exactly how the broadcast operation worked.
The Discovery
I spent time inside the CBS Sports HQ control room with the broadcast director and production team, learning the different states involved in pre-production and live production.
I mapped how games were scheduled, how segments were identified, when highlights entered the broadcast, and what information existed behind the scenes that viewers never saw.
That process uncovered the key insight.
A middleware system called Fusion was already identifying team names as part of the production workflow.
It was not designed to solve our digital publishing problem, but it gave us the signal we needed.
Instead of trying to introduce an entirely new metadata system into a live broadcast environment, we could use information the production workflow was already generating and turn it into a structured language that our digital platforms could understand.
The Solution
Project Clicker created an automated workflow for identifying, clipping, tagging and distributing highlights directly from the CBS Sports HQ live stream.
We established a structured short-code naming convention around the teams appearing in each game. Because the production workflow consistently identified the matchup, we could apply rules around away team versus home team based on order and translate those values into the appropriate digital identifiers.
We then combined that information with time.
The system captured the timestamp associated with the highlight and applied predetermined windows before and after that moment to determine where the video clip should begin and end.
The timestamp also gave us another critical piece of information: the calendar date.
By combining team identifiers + home/away logic + date + timestamp, we could resolve the highlight against the correct scheduled game and ultimately its CBS Sports game ID.
That game ID became the connective tissue for everything downstream.
Once a clip was associated with a game, it could inherit the metadata necessary to intelligently distribute it across the CBS Sports ecosystem.
From One Broadcast to an Entire Digital Ecosystem
Instead of a producer manually creating and publishing every asset, Project Clicker transformed moments from the live stream into structured digital objects.
A highlight could now move automatically into the CMS and become eligible for association with:
Articles and editorial pages based on the teams and game context.
Scoreboards and game experiences using the resolved game ID.
Mobile applications where team and league affinities were already known.
Push notifications tied to relevant games, teams and moments.
Video recommendations and playback surfaces that could use structured metadata instead of relying on manual placement.
The project effectively turned the CBS Sports HQ programming feed into a new content-production engine.
The Impact
Project Clicker changed the economics of a workflow that had previously depended on manual video production.
33,000 hours of manual work eliminated annually
Automating the identification, cutting, tagging and publishing process removed tens of thousands of hours that would otherwise have been spent manually producing video clips.
4x increase in available VOD inventory
Automation allowed CBS Sports to create substantially more usable highlight assets from programming it was already producing and rights it was already paying for. Before 30-40 custom VOD assets would be created per day. YOU CANNOT PERSONALIZE 30 VIDEOS. We needed volume and Project Clicker answered that need.
+$5 Million in incremental annual revenue
The expanded video inventory created additional monetizable impressions across CBS Sports digital products, generating more than $5 million in incremental annual advertising revenue.
More importantly, those gains did not require CBS Sports to acquire another sports property or dramatically increase headcount.
We generated more value from rights and content that already existed.
Why This Project Matters
“Project Clicker” is one of my favorite examples of product management because the solution did not start with a feature request.
It started with understanding an operational system.
I went into the broadcast control room, learned how producers actually worked, identified an overlooked piece of metadata already moving through the production stack, and connected that signal to a much larger digital opportunity.
The result was not simply a video-editing tool.
It created a bridge between broadcast production, metadata, content management, personalization, mobile distribution and advertising monetization.
Project Clicker took an expensive asset that was being used once and created a system that could continuously repackage and redistribute its value across the CBS Sports ecosystem.
My Role
Product Strategy & Product Leadership
I identified the opportunity, embedded with the broadcast team to understand the production workflow, mapped the available metadata, defined the logic connecting production signals to CBS Sports game IDs, and worked across broadcast, editorial, engineering, video, mobile and monetization teams to turn the concept into a scalable product workflow.
The core product insight was simple:
We did not need to create more content. We needed to create a better system for understanding and distributing the content we already had.
Christopher Hrynczyszyn
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