In sports, the window of audience attention is measured in seconds. A goal goes in. A buzzer beats. A headshot lands in the grand final on Twitch. Somewhere between that moment and the first clip appearing on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, you either win the fan — or lose them to a faster content publisher.

The old workflow was simple, if painful. The main horizontal stream goes out, and a team of editors waits for post-production to crop, caption, and upload. By the time the vertical video clip ships, the conversation has moved on.

That gap is exactly what VisionFlow closes. Built by Spyrosoft BSG, VisionFlow delivers automated 9:16 live cropping, event-based clipping, and instant clip delivery — broadcast-grade, end to end, without an editor in the loop.

The vertical shift isn’t coming. It’s already here.

If you still treat vertical video as a social media side project, the numbers should change your mind.

Vertical format overtakes horizontal formats in sports

For the 2024–25 season, vertical video hit 38% of the NBA’s total video production, with 9:16 output up 25.6% year-on-year. Across the wider sports-tech landscape, 67% of all video clips produced by major rights holders in 2024 were vertical — compared with just 26% in 2022 (source: WSC Sports industry data). That’s not a trend line. That’s a format inversion.

Engagement follows the vertical format

The business impact is just as clear:

  • The NBA app’s vertical “stories” drove a 700% surge in video consumption and tripled in-app engagement within a year.
  • LaLiga reported a 70% increase in user sessions and 40% more time spent in the app after redesigning around the vertical format.
  • Partner broadcasters now deliver video clips 80% faster and have doubled output volume.
  • LaLiga alone auto-generates more than 260,000 highlight reels per season.

European audiences live on mobile and Twitch

Closer to home, IEM Katowice 2025 peaked at nearly 1.3 million concurrent viewers and was broadcast natively across Twitch, YouTube, Kick, Facebook, and TikTok. Polish and European audiences consume sport on mobile, on multiple platforms, and the biggest esports brands treat Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok as a single content ecosystem, not three separate ones.

The question for heads of digital and broadcast operations isn’t whether to go vertical. It’s whether your production pipeline can keep up with the demand you’re already seeing.

Why the traditional workflow can’t keep up

Most sports media operations were built around a single horizontal stream. That made sense when linear TV was the endpoint. It doesn’t any more.

Manual video editing eats hours

Editors re-frame the action shot by shot, re-apply captions, re-export for every platform. The hard work scales linearly with the number of destinations.

Highlights publish late

By the time a goal clip lands on social media, the algorithm has moved on — and so have your fans. The memorable moments of the match are stale before your shareable clips reach the audience.

Distribution across multiple platforms is fragmented

YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok, Twitch, Facebook, partner VOD, sponsor press folders, club apps — each destination has its own format, aspect ratio, captions style, and delivery path.

Sponsor obligations pile up

Branded moments, sponsor deliverables, and post-match interviews still get produced by hand, often under contractual deadlines.

Costs scale with volume

More platforms, more video editing, more operators — and the same 90 minutes of live action. The result is a quality-versus-speed trade-off every content team knows too well. Move fast and lose polish. Keep the polish and lose the moment.

What VisionFlow does

VisionFlow takes one live stream and turns it into a fully automated, multi-destination vertical video pipeline. Four capabilities make that possible.

1. Intelligent automated 9:16 live cropping

VisionFlow converts your horizontal broadcast signal into a perfectly framed vertical format on the fly. The AI automatically detects the subject of the action and keeps it in frame — whether that’s the ball, the player, the ring, or the speaker at a post-match interview.

The tool acts as a virtual camera operator, tracking the play and adjusting the 9:16 frame in real time. Critical visual elements stay inside the mobile safe zones so graphics, captions, and key moments never get cut off. The AI analyses each shot, detects faces and movement, and ensures that the best parts of the action remain in focus across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts alike.

No manual keyframing. No tedious editing. Mobile audiences get a native, full-screen experience that looks like it was shot for vertical from the start.

2. Automatic event clipping

Scrubbing through a long video to find the moment that matters is a job for an editor, not your platform. VisionFlow uses metadata, markers, and defined events — goals, key esports plays, penalties, post-match interviews — and the AI analyses them to generate ready-to-publish video clips automatically.

The trigger can be anything you integrate with: an official data feed, a statistics provider, a stadium control system, or a custom marker set by your production team. VisionFlow identifies the most memorable moments of the match, captures the surrounding context, and produces multiple clips per event in a vertical format ready for publishing.

Each clip lands in your system the moment the event ends. No manual work. No waiting for the editor. Just shareable clips, ready for the platforms your audience lives on.

3. Instant auto-delivery across multiple platforms

A clip sitting on a server isn’t worth much. VisionFlow distributes finished files to defined endpoints the instant they’re created — partner VOD systems, sponsor press folders, club mobile apps, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Facebook, or your internal video CMS.

You define the routing once, including per-platform templates for captions, branding, and audio quality. VisionFlow handles the rest in parallel, across every channel you care about. One horizontal stream in. Hundreds of viral clips out.

4. Broadcast-grade performance and audio quality

None of this matters if the output doesn’t meet broadcast standards. VisionFlow runs without degrading the original signal, with the minimal latency professional live streaming demands. Audio quality is preserved end to end, with per-platform captions generated automatically and branding applied via brand templates.

The same pipeline that feeds your vertical output can sit alongside your traditional workflow — no compromise, no parallel infrastructure.

What this changes for your business

The most obvious gain is speed. Turning a live moment into a distributed 9:16 clip drops from a multi-step manual process to something close to real time. That’s the “golden minutes” problem solved — your vertical content creation ships while fans are still reacting to the moment that created it.

Save time, cut cost, scale content creation

One input stream, a fully automated production pipeline, and multi-channel distribution replace the hours of editor and operator time that short-form content used to demand. Your team shifts from tedious video editing to strategic content creation. You save time on every match day. You cut cost per clip across the whole pipeline. Your editor team can finally focus on the stories, not the scissors. VisionFlow is built on modern cloud streaming infrastructure, so you scale up for match day and scale down between fixtures, without paying for idle hardware.

Reach the audience across multiple platforms

Every platform your audience lives on — TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Twitch, Facebook, club apps, sponsor channels — gets fed from the same stream, in the right format, at the right moment. Sponsor deliverables become a configuration, not a bespoke production task. Fan engagement moves from episodic to continuous.

Turn one long video into dozens of viral clips

A 90-minute match is a long video. VisionFlow turns it into dozens, sometimes hundreds, of shareable clips — goals, tackles, celebrations, post-match interviews, sponsor moments — each tuned to the vertical format your audience scrolls through at speed. The tool transforms a single long-form stream into a fast-growth content engine for social media, with near zero effort from your editorial team.

Compete in a shifting rights market

Rights markets across Europe are shifting. Viaplay exited Poland in June 2025, with Premier League, Bundesliga, Formula 1, and KSW rights redistributing across CANAL+, Polsat, TVP, and newer entrants. Every winning bidder now needs differentiated fan experiences, not just the live stream. Automated vertical distribution is one of the few levers available at the speed the market is moving.

In conclusion

Automated 9:16 live cropping is no longer a nice-to-have experiment. It’s the production reality of every sports organisation serious about mobile audience growth. The leagues and broadcasters already running automated pipelines are setting the pace — and the gap between them and the rest is widening every season.

VisionFlow is built for the organisations that need to close that gap without rebuilding their infrastructure. It sits on top of fifteen years of broadcast engineering by Spyrosoft BSG, a long-standing technology partner to broadcasters and rights holders distributing sports and live content — including CANAL+ in Poland, Norway’s leading private broadcaster TV2, Polish public broadcaster TVP, and Orange.

One live stream in. Hundreds of ready-to-publish vertical clips out, delivered to the platforms where your audience already lives.

Book a demo and we’ll show you how VisionFlow transforms your single live stream into a fast, automated, multi-platform content engine.

VisionFlow is an enterprise broadcast tool, not a free consumer app. We offer a personalised demo and proof-of-concept for rights holders, broadcasters, and sports organisations. Get in touch and we’ll walk you through the pipeline on your own content.

Yes. VisionFlow accepts standard broadcast formats and integrates with your existing production infrastructure. The AI features sit on top of your current workflow rather than replacing it.

That depends on how you define events. For a 90-minute football match with typical markers, expect dozens of vertical clips per match day across your platforms. For esports broadcasts on Twitch, the volume is usually higher because the tempo of key moments is faster.

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Damian Maicher

Business Researcher

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