Ferran Torres settled the 2026 World Cup final for Spain in extra time, on July 19 in New Jersey. A goal like that now lives twice. The first life is on the pitch. The second starts seconds later, when software finds the moment, cuts it and posts it with a brand attached, "often before television broadcasts have finished showing a replay," as i24NEWS reported a month before the final.
That report named two Israeli companies in the chain, WSC Sports and Pixellot. Both have big numbers to share, and writing about sports technology tends to stop at the numbers. It rarely asks when all this happens, or who wanted it that fast.
Timing is the change that can actually be traced. Fans used to react after a match, and now they do things during it, which takes a pipeline that runs in seconds. As for who wanted it that fast, the customer list includes companies offering real-time sports engagement services, and they turn up at more points along the pipeline than the talk of fan engagement lets on.
Clips moved out of the late bulletin and into the match
The old highlight ran on a schedule. It came on the late sports bulletin or a weekend show, hours after the result, and the person watching usually knew the score already.
WSC Sports built its business on removing that wait. About 550 of its roughly 650 staff were in Israel at the start of this year, Calcalist reported. The company told i24NEWS its systems produced 16 million highlights in 2025, from more than 450,000 live broadcasts, which works out to about 44,000 clips a day. Software spots the event, cuts it for each platform, translates it and adds the graphics. For the 104 matches of the World Cup, the system was expected to run across dozens of channels and languages at once.
Yitav Topaz, a WSC vice president, described the aim as reaching fans "in near real time, at the peak of their excitement." That peak comes during play, and a clip sent during play does a different job from one sent after it.
A digital entertainment company put that job into words in 2021. That February an American sports platform signed with WSC to push real-time golf highlights to users of its mobile app, which Sports Video Group reported as the first time a US operator had sent highlights packages directly to its audience. Its sports content chief said customers would get clips "to consume and act on."
Those last two words are the useful ones. A round of golf could still be running when such a clip arrived, and the person holding the phone could still do something with it. Most clips never go near such an app, of course; Calcalist put WSC's client list at more than 650 sports organizations, including the NBA, ESPN, YouTube TV and La Liga.
Automated cameras needed a buyer, and Scotland's second tier found one
A clip needs footage, and most sport never had any. Dave Shapiro of Pixellot put the gap at "200 million events not being produced" in a December 2019 report by Inside World Soccer. His company's answer was a fixed box of cameras at the ground, with software following the ball and the players so nobody has to operate it. It had 6,000 systems installed then.
Kobi Bendel, a Pixellot sales manager, told Sports Video Group in November 2025 that the count had passed 40,000, and i24NEWS has since given the company's output as more than two million matches a year in over 80 countries, more than 850,000 of them streamed live. Bendel described the business as "mainly secondary sports," the events broadcasters had left alone.
Cheap filming still leaves the question of who wants a given match. One answer came in December 2019, when the Scottish Professional Soccer League signed a five-year deal with IMG Arena, a sports content distribution business. The deal called for Pixellot's cameras at the grounds of the Championship, one level below the Premiership. Inside World Soccer said the deal was primarily meant "to create volume online and mobile footage for IMG Arena to sell to its international media clients," and the announcement offered the footage only to countries outside the UK and Ireland.
So a fixed camera at a Scottish ground would film for people overseas, and supporters down the road couldn't watch that feed. Neil Doncaster, the SPFL's chief executive, spoke of money to "reinvest" across the league, though the announcement carried no figure.
Not every camera had that customer. The 2019 report also described more than 100 amateur pitches in Mexico with Pixellot systems, streaming over 72,000 games a year, and software that could cut each player a personal reel.
Phones turned watching a match into doing something during it
The audience for all this is very large. Awful Announcing added Fox's 42.5 million for the match-only window to Telemundo's 23.9 million and got 66.4 million US viewers for the final. Telemundo said streaming made up 48% of its total World Cup audience, up from 30% in 2022, with 3 million viewers in the average minute on its streaming platforms against 767,000 four years earlier.
The broadcaster i24NEWS cited industry data putting nearly three-quarters of sports fans on social media for their sport and more than 60% on short clips. During matches, fans could put a tactical question to an AI tool and get an answer with the game still on.
All of those figures count attention. None of them can say who acted on a clip, to borrow that 2021 phrase, or what anyone did with a phone in the 70th minute. A real-time engagement platform can say part of that, since every interaction carries a time. In September the operator behind play971.ae told Khaleej Times, through its commercial director for iGaming, Philippa Bowland, that activity on its live sports platform increased during the final of a recent global soccer tournament, as fans followed the match in real time.
As evidence, her remark is thin. It comes from one operator in one narrow market. The website serves UAE residents 21 and older, it checks that they're physically in the country, and it covers only parts of that country. Dubai isn't one of them. There's no figure, and it's a company describing its own business. The report doesn't name the tournament, though the timing points to the World Cup. It also says nothing about the outcomes of those interactions.
Real time meant very different things on different screens
Khaleej Times's phrase, "followed the match in real time," covers a wide range. What Hi-Fi? published a chart in June showing how long a goal took to reach British viewers, at eight seconds on Freeview through an aerial, 10 on Sky Q by satellite, 35 on Sky's Glass and Stream services and 40 on BBC iPlayer. Sky said its new Real Time option would take 22 seconds off that streaming figure, and the magazine cautioned that broadband and delivery change the numbers. It also said the BBC had been working on low-latency streaming but didn't look ready to roll it out widely.
Put that chart beside the clip pipeline i24NEWS described and the order of events can flip. A fan 40 seconds behind could meet the goal as a clip on a social feed, or as a neighbor's shout through the wall, before the stream shows it. What Hi-Fi? judged Sky's upgrade on exactly that test, whether it lowered the chance of hearing about a goal before seeing it.
The shortest delay in this story belongs to a different customer. "We even have a three-second delay so we can give a solution for digital sports platforms," Bendel said in that 2025 interview. Three seconds and 40 seconds don't come from the same test, so the comparison is rough. It still shows who that fast feed was pitched to.
For most fans the gap means a spoiled goal. Someone following a live interactive sports service on a 40-second stream is in a more awkward spot, because information can change before the screen has shown the event.
The bill for those seconds keeps moving to new payers
Viewers cover part of it themselves. Cordbusters reported that Sky recommends 40Mbps for Real Time against 25Mbps for standard HD, and that live TV can't be rewound while it's on. In Germany, Vodafone gave its own World Cup fix a name, the Jubel-Booster, or celebration booster, and its chief technology officer promised a cable delay "reduced by several seconds" for goals on ARD and ZDF. Neither report says what the work cost.
Commercial partnerships are another source of funding, and the contracts move. In September 2024 Sportcal reported that Stats Perform had replaced IMG Arena as seller of Scottish soccer's international video content, with media partners promised the Premiership and "select fixtures" from the second and third tiers.
Sponsors are the other payer, and WSC moved toward them this year. In January it bought Partnerbrite, a British sponsorship platform, in a deal Calcalist estimated at around $10 million (neither side disclosed terms). The plan is to link real-time highlights with targeted brand campaigns through self-service tools, so a goal can turn into an advertising slot about as quickly as it turns into a clip.
Some coverage has a much smaller bill. The Jerusalem Post reported in July that Pixellot had renewed its Maccabiah partnership for a second year of worldwide streaming, in a deal valued at tens of thousands of dollars and described as part of the company's long-standing support for the Games. Roy Hessing, the Maccabiah's chief executive, said the goal was that "geography is no barrier to experiencing the games."
Ariel Yehezkel of Pixellot told i24NEWS that "What was once a privilege reserved for the highest level of sport has now become the standard on neighborhood fields." He's probably right about the cameras.
The money behind them is harder to see. Neither WSC Sports nor Pixellot, as far as we could find, has published how much of its income comes from digital platform customers, sponsors, rights holders or viewers. Until one of them does, the claim that digital tools handed sport back to its fans stays hard to test, in either direction.