A New Era of Multi-Sport Storytelling: ANOC and Spectatr.ai at the Islamic Solidarity Games Riyadh 2025
3 hours ago
The Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC), in collaboration with the Islamic Solidarity Sports Association (ISSA), partnered with AI sports technology company Spectatr.ai to deliver real-time, AI-powered highlights at the 6th Islamic Solidarity Games (ISG) Riyadh 2025, marking a significant step forward in how large-scale, multi-sport events are covered and shared digitally. For the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) and Islamic Solidarity Sports Association (ISSA), this edition represented a turning point: a chance to dramatically expand the Games’ digital reach, modernise how stories are told, and ensure that every nation and every athlete had a place on the global stage.
Held from 7–21 November 2025, the Games brought together more than 3,500 athletes from 57 National Olympic Committees, competing across 20+ sports. With multiple competitions running simultaneously across venues, ANOC sought a solution that could scale content production, ensure equal athlete visibility, and enable near-instant distribution to global audiences.
Addressing the Challenges of Multi-Sport Coverage
Covering multi-sport events at this scale presents unique challenges. Traditional editorial workflows rely heavily on manual processes, requiring editors to monitor live feeds, identify key moments, clip footage, format content, and distribute it across platforms. At ISG Riyadh 2025, this approach risked delays, limited output, and uneven representation across nations.
To address this, ANOC deployed Spectatr.ai’s AI engine, PULSE, to automate real-time highlight generation across all competitions.
Real-Time Highlights at Scale
Throughout the Games, PULSE continuously monitored live match streams, automatically detecting key sporting moments such as goals, finishes, rallies, podium ceremonies, and emotional athlete reactions. Within seconds, these moments were converted into ready-to-publish video clips enriched with metadata, including athlete names, nations, sport, and contextual tags, and automatically formatted for both 16:9 and 9:16 distribution.
All clips were branded with ISG Riyadh 2025 intros and graphics, ensuring visual consistency across platforms and reducing manual editing requirements for broadcasters and NOCs.
The content was delivered directly to ANOC, ISSA, and their Digital Content Hub, supporting the NOC digital teams. For the first time at this scale, every participating NOC, regardless of size—received daily highlights of their athletes, enabling real-time engagement with fans back home.
ANOC leadership saw this as a major leap toward the future of sports coverage. Secretary General Mrs. Gunilla Lindberg highlighted how the partnership reflected ANOC’s commitment to innovation, ensuring that every performance, from the biggest stars to first-time athletes — could be shared immediately with global audiences. Spectatr.ai Co-Founder Richa Singh noted that the collaboration enabled a new style of storytelling that captures not just results, but the emotion, intensity, and human connection that define the Games.
“Our partnership with Spectatr.ai reflects the ISSA’s commitment to adopting artificial intelligence as a core institutional tool,” said ISSA Secretary General Nasser Majali. “By leveraging AI-driven, real-time highlights, we enhanced global visibility for athletes from our 57 member countries and enabled National Olympic Committees to access high-quality video content, helping the Islamic Solidarity Games reach wider audiences worldwide.”
Measurable Digital Impact during ISG Riyadh 2025
- First-ever daily, NOC-tailored highlight packages: Spectatr.ai delivered every day the best moments from each of the 57 participating National Olympic Committees (512 daily highlights in total), delivering 3–5 minute team-specific highlight packages and published on ANOC.TV. For the first time, fans across all 57 NOCs could access NOC-specific daily highlights, complementing the official sports and Games highlights.
- Unprecedented scale of real-time content production: The AI-driven workflow generated 50,000+ real-time clips over 15 days, with an average of nearly 500 highlights published daily to the ANOCs digital hub, accessible to all National Olympic Committees (NOCs).
- Sustained audience growth across official social channels: Content distributed via ANOC.TV, ISSA, and the official ISG Riyadh 2025 social accounts delivered 7.5+ million video views across platforms, with engagement building consistently throughout the duration of the Games.
- Stronger fan engagement through instant storytelling: With key moments published within seconds of occurring, the content recorded 250,000+ likes, and significant comments and shares, enabling fans to follow competitions in near real time and driving higher reach, deeper engagement, and a stronger emotional connection to the Games.
- Expanded global reach across participating NOCs: Across the social channels of the NOCs, the real-time clips published and distributed to NOCs through the ANOC Digital Content Hub during the Games achieved 2M+ video views, generated 50K+ comments, and delivered strong cross-market reach.
A Blueprint for the Future of Multi-Sport Events
ANOC leadership viewed the collaboration as a strategic step toward modernising sports coverage at scale. By automating time-intensive editorial tasks, the solution allowed content teams to focus on storytelling rather than manual production, while ensuring fair and inclusive representation across all nations.
The workflows established at ISG Riyadh 2025 now serve as a scalable blueprint for future editions of the Games and other multi-sport events where ANOC could potentially be engaged as a partner, demonstrating how AI can expand both capacity and quality without increasing operational overhead.
As global sports events continue to grow in scale and complexity, the ANOC × Spectatr.ai partnership at ISG Riyadh 2025 illustrates how real-time AI-powered highlights can redefine digital storytelling, ensuring that no moment is missed, no athlete is overlooked, and fans worldwide remain connected as events unfold.