🔊 Here's How The NBA Plans To Keep Your Attention With AI

📰 TOP STORY
Here's How The NBA Plans To Keep Your Attention Longer…

• The NBA Recently Announced New Programming And Enhancements On The NBA App Ahead Of The 2023-24 Season. The NBA App, which generated more than one billion video views this past season, will now deliver unique experiences through advanced personalization features, enhanced live game viewing options, and expanded content offerings that will bring fans closer to the game.

With the new personalized experience NBA App powered by Microsoft Azure AI Services, fans will have the ability to add multiple team and player tabs to their app main screen, giving them access to real-time content.

The new tabs will also include:

• Latest NBA news

• Trending topics

• Vertical video highlights

• Updates on their favorite teams and players

A new “Moments” experience will allow fans to scroll through unlimited NBA content using a vertical social media-style interface.

NBA ID members will also have expanded benefits this season with the opportunity to earn new badges by watching live games and programming on the NBA App and NBA League Pass, voting for NBA All-Star, daily trivia, and more. Members will additionally have the chance to win special prizes, including tickets throughout the regular season (more here).

💰 MONEY MOVES 
More Sports Tech Companies Raise Funding

• Gemini Sports Analytics Completes $3.25 Million Investment Round. Gemini Sports Analytics, a no-code AI platform for predictive modeling, has completed an oversubscribed $3.25 million investment round with participation from pro team owners (more here).

• Sports Tech Start-Up Game Theory Raises $2 Million In Pre-Series A Funding. The company which is focused on enhancing real sports engagement and accessibility, has secured $2 million in a pre-Series A funding round. Industry players like Nithin Kamath’s Rainmatter, Rohan Bopanna, WEH Ventures, Prequate Advisory, and prominent angel investors, including Balakrishna Adiga, have invested in the company (more here).

• Zelus Analytics Raises Series A Funding To Accelerate Growth In Sports Analytics. The round includes participation from Teamworthy Ventures, Gametime Capital, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's 35V, Billy Beane, and others, who join existing investor RedBird Capital (more here).

• AI-Powered SwingVision Raises $6 Million Series A Round. Authentic Ventures led the investment, which included participation from tennis pros Lindsay Davenport and Alison Riske-Amritraj. SwingVision’s existing investors include additional ex-pros Andy Roddick and James Blake (more here).

• Scorability Raises $11 Million In Funding To Make College Athletics Recruiting More Efficient. Scorability, a platform for matching athletes with college athletics programs, today announced it has raised $11 million in Series Seed funding. The investment comes from Next Coast Ventures and Silverton Partners (more here).

• Athlete-Creator Start-Up Grandstand Raises $2.75 Million Round. Grandstand, which is bringing the best of the creator economy to sports has announced the round of seed funding this past week led by Will Ventures (more here).

• Populous Announces Minority Investment From Providence Equity Partners. Populous Holdings announced a strategic minority investment from Providence Equity Partners, a premier private equity firm specializing in growth-oriented investments in media, communications, education, and technology companies. Populous specializes in designing sports facilities, arenas, convention centers, and airports, as well as the planning and design of large-scale events (more here).

 🤝 PARTNERSHIPS & COLLABS
NBA & WNBA Games Are Coming To Your Peloton Device

• Peloton, The NBA, And WNBA Announce New Multi-Year Partnership. Peloton, the NBA, and the WNBA announced a multi-year partnership, naming Peloton an official fitness partner of the two leagues. The collaboration will make NBA League Pass, the league’s premium live game subscription service, available to stream across compatible Peloton devices in the fitness platform’s new Entertainment hub, which will launch during the 2023-24 NBA season – a first-of-its-kind Peloton offering (more here).

• NHL Extends Partnership With Pramana Labs. Pramana Labs, whose industry-leading technology allows natural language querying of an organization’s databases, has expanded its relationship with the National Hockey League in a multiyear, multi-discipline deal that will include NHL EDGE, the League’s Puck and Player Tracking technology (more here).

• NFL+ Viewing Experience Transformed Through Genius Sports’ AI-Powered Data-Driven Alternative Broadcasts. Genius Sports has expanded its partnership with the NFL to power NFL+, the NFL’s video streaming subscription service, with data-driven on-screen graphic overlays and visualizations that bring the live action to life in real-time (more here).

• Sportradar Will Partner With Tennis Channel To Power Their New DTC Streaming Service. This platform includes access to Tennis Channel’s marquee, 24/7 linear channel alongside thousands of hours of live and on-demand matches and original programming (more here).

🔊 OTHER HYPE
NBA Gets Bump From International Demand

• StubHub Sees 60% Jump In Ticket Sales For NBA Season As International Interest Surges. With the NBA season tipping off this week, StubHub sees ticket sales up nearly 60% compared to last year, with the Los Angeles Lakers returning to the top of the list as the most in-demand team (more here).

• ‘Forward-Looking’ Boutique Agency Iris Launched By Francini And ex-IMG Duo. Iris Sport Media, the company set up by Ioris Francini and his former IMG colleagues Floris Weisz and Luca Baldanza, has officially launched. The boutique agency has been set up with three verticals: investment; media rights commercialization and representation; and technology (more here).

• ESPN Drops Logo For Sports Betting App. ESPN BET, a branded online sportsbook for fans in the United States, today unveiled its new logo ahead of its November launch (more here).

• 5 Key Themes Sports-Betting Leaders Were Buzzing About At The Biggest US Gambling Conference. Artificial intelligence, online gambling regulation, and cybersecurity were hot topics at this year's Gambling Gaming Expo, the largest gambling conference in the US, where many of the industry's top leaders gathered last week in Las Vegas, Nevada (more here).

• Behind The AI Magic That Lets Amazon’s Prime Vision Show The NFL Like Never Before. Some viewers of Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos got a special experience: seeing what was going to happen on a play before it actually happened (more here).

• Netflix To Host Its First-Ever Live Sports Event As 'Drive to Survive' & 'Full Swing' Athletes Tee Up And Face Off In All-Star Golf Tournament. This fall, stars of two Netflix sports series will face off in The Netflix Cup, Netflix’s first-ever live sports event featuring athletes from Formula 1: Drive to Survive and Full Swing (more here).