Minute Media, the publisher of Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune and 90min, has purchased VideoVerse, an artificial intelligence company in Mumbai that is best known for automatically extracting and packaging sports highlights. The deal further expands Minute Media’s foray into AI-driven content production and distribution, and follows investors backing from the likes of BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.
VideoVerse’s software watches live or recorded games, identifies the moments that matter, and produces ready-to-publish clips for social, OTT and broadcast workflows. Its client list includes marquee properties like the Indian Premier League and Women’s Premier League cricket, FIFA+ and leading Asia-wide broadcasters.
Why this acquisition matters
Minute Media already has an audience of over 200 million monthly users, and a B2B distribution platform used by around 500 publishers. It’s end-to-end control: The company can create clips at scale, distribute them through its network, monetize with advertising and sponsorship — without relying on third parties to get it done.
It also falls in line with a larger consolidation play. Minute Media has expanded by deal-making — including The Players’ Tribune, FanSided, Mental Floss and STN Video — to cobble together a portfolio that combines high-value editorial with tech infrastructure. Combining that reach with automated clip creation puts the company in position to pitch leagues, teams and rights-holders on a single stack for production, distribution and revenue.
Inside VideoVerse’s AI stack
VideoVerse was founded in 2016 by Vinayak Shrivastav, and pivoted early from general-purpose computer vision to sports after demand from fast-growing streaming platforms in India. Today, its platform recognizes game-specific events — fours and wickets in cricket, three pointers and dunks in basketball, goals and offsides in football — and immediately produces compilations according to a client’s rules.
Recent features include rule-based automation, which allows producers to dictate clip packages (for, say, every three-pointer made by a single player over the course of a game); instant social publishing; and A.I. powered translation and subtitling capabilities to localize content for global audiences. And, though the company uses third-party models where helpful, it employs its own moment-detection models trained on sports-specific signals to reduce latency and enhance precision.
The business operates as SaaS service and often charges by the hour of footage it processes. VideoVerse has scaled to roughly $65m of annual revenue with EBITDA margins that we understand are in the mid 30s, according to company stats provided in investor materials. The start-up has raised about $105 million from investors like Bluestone Equity Partners, A91 Partners and Moneta Ventures.
The markets context: highlights are the new front door
Short-form sports video has become the on-ramp for a new generation of younger fans. Industry research from Deloitte and Nielsen has also consistently highlighted booming engagement with clips on mobile and social platforms, where discovery increasingly takes place. Rights-holders are starting to treat highlights as a revenue stream in their own right, separate from live-game rights, and brands now bid on pre-rolls, mid-rolls and sponsored compilations.
Competition is heating up. An Israeli startup, WSC Sports, has popularized the technology of automating highlights and has built workflow systems for major United States leagues; other firms like Pixellot automate lower-tier production. The differentiator for Minute Media is not about being a category creator as it is with Bleacher Report but rather a combination of creating content and distributing it on an O&O (at big scale, that is, which most pure-play tech vendors don’t have).
That integration could be relevant in the United States, where Minute Media is looking to win more league and team deals. And with a vast publisher network, it can offer more than fast clips: It can offer guaranteed reach and data feedback loops that will optimize creative and ad yield.
Rights, speed and revenue: what shifts next
For rights-holders, the appeal is speed-to-social and incremental monetization. If a basketball star nails a flurry of threes, a sponsor-branded highlight reel can be created and pushed out within minutes across team channels, league apps and partner sites. For international competitions like the World Cup, automatic translation and templated graphics mean localized highlights can reach markets that had previously gone underserved.
For publishers, the commercial thrill is in packaging: More clips, sliced by player, moment, market and platform format, typically equates to higher fill rates and more accurate targeting.
Minute Media can plug these assets into its ad stack and commerce units all the while upholding its editorial standards across Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune and 90min.
What to watch
Execution risk lies in three areas: smooth integration of VideoVerse into existing toolchains; rights compliance across leagues which police clip lengths and latency; and model performance as the platform scales beyond cricket to the nuance of American sports.
Look for Minute Media to focus in particular on transparent rights workflows, and to release case studies “authenticating uplift” in engagement and ad revenue.
And with more than $260-million in financing to date, according to those venture-capital databases, Minute Media still has M&A options on the table. If this deal demonstrates that end-to-end creation-and-distribution trumps stand-alone tools, further media groups, and their investors, will chase after similar AI-enabled stacks for sports and, eventually, live events beyond sports.