Minute Media, the publisher behind Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune and 90min, has acquired VideoVerse, a Mumbai-based artificial intelligence company known for automatically extracting and packaging sports highlights. The deal deepens Minute Media’s push into AI-enabled content production and distribution, and underscores investor confidence from backers such as BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.
VideoVerse’s software watches live or recorded games, detects key moments, and generates ready-to-publish clips for social, OTT and broadcast workflows. Its client roster spans marquee properties including the Indian Premier League and Women’s Premier League cricket, FIFA+, and major broadcasters in Asia.
Why this acquisition matters
Minute Media already reaches more than 200 million monthly users and operates a B2B distribution platform used by roughly 500 publishers. Owning an AI engine for highlights gives the company end-to-end control: create clips at scale, distribute them through its network, and monetize with advertising and sponsorships—without waiting on third parties.
It also fits a broader consolidation strategy. Minute Media has grown through deals—The Players’ Tribune, FanSided, Mental Floss and STN Video among them—building a portfolio that mixes premium editorial with tech infrastructure. Pairing that reach with automated clip creation positions the company to pitch leagues, teams and rights-holders a single stack for production, distribution and revenue.
Inside VideoVerse’s AI stack
Founded in 2016 by Vinayak Shrivastav, VideoVerse pivoted early from general-purpose computer vision to sports after demand from fast-growing streaming platforms in India. Today, its platform detects game-specific events—fours and wickets in cricket, three-pointers and dunks in basketball, goals and offsides in football—and instantly assembles compilations that match a client’s rules.
Recent features include rule-based automation that lets producers define clip packages (for example, every three-pointer by a single player across a game), instant social publishing, and AI-powered translation and subtitling to localize content for global audiences. While the company incorporates third-party models where useful, it relies on proprietary moment-detection models trained on sports-specific signals to cut latency and improve precision.
The business runs as SaaS, typically charging by hours of footage processed. According to company figures referenced in investor materials, VideoVerse has scaled to about $65 million in annual revenue with EBITDA margins reported in the mid-30s. The startup has raised roughly $105 million from investors including Bluestone Equity Partners, A91 Partners and Moneta Ventures.
The market context: highlights are the new front door
Short-form sports video has become the on-ramp for younger fans. Industry research from Deloitte and Nielsen has repeatedly noted rising engagement with clips on mobile and social platforms, where discovery increasingly happens. Rights-holders now treat highlights as a revenue stream in their own right, distinct from live-game rights, with brands bidding for pre-rolls, mid-rolls and sponsored compilations.
Competition is heating up. Israeli startup WSC Sports popularized automated highlights and powers workflows for major U.S. leagues; firms like Pixellot automate lower-tier production. Minute Media’s differentiator is less about inventing the category and more about fusing creation with owned-and-operated distribution at scale—something pure-play tech vendors typically lack.
That integration could matter in the U.S., where Minute Media aims to win more league and team deals. With a large publisher network, it can promise not just faster clips, but guaranteed reach and data feedback loops that optimize creative and ad yield.
Rights, speed and revenue: what changes next
For rights-holders, the attraction is speed-to-social and incremental monetization. If a basketball star hits a flurry of threes, a sponsor-branded montage can be generated and posted within minutes across team channels, league apps and partner sites. For global tournaments, automatic translation and templated graphics help deliver localized highlights to markets that previously went under-served.
For publishers, the commercial upside is in packaging: more clips, sliced by player, moment, market and platform format, usually translates to higher fill rates and more precise targeting. Minute Media can plug these assets into its ad stack and commerce units while maintaining editorial standards across Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune and 90min.
What to watch
Execution risk sits in three areas: seamless integration of VideoVerse into existing toolchains; rights compliance across leagues that police clip lengths and latency; and model performance as the platform scales beyond cricket to the nuance of American sports. Expect Minute Media to emphasize transparent rights workflows and to publish case studies validating uplift in engagement and ad revenue.
With Minute Media having raised more than $260 million to date, according to venture databases, further M&A remains on the table. If this deal proves that tightly coupled creation-and-distribution outperforms stand-alone tools, more media groups—and their investors—will chase similar AI-enabled stacks for sports and, eventually, live events beyond sports.