Hockey One Achieves 9x Fan Engagement Through Real-Time AI Highlights by Spectatr.ai in 2025

By deploying Spectatr.ai’s PULSE AI engine, the league delivered 10.6M + video views and 9x fan engagement growth during its global expansion season.

Hockey One League, Australia’s premier national field hockey competition, partnered with AI sports technology company Spectatr.ai to deliver real-time, AI-powered highlights at Season Five in 2025, marking a significant step forward in how domestic leagues leverage digital innovation to expand their reach globally.

In August 2025, Hockey One League achieved a major milestone by launching Hockey One Global Pass—a dedicated OTT streaming platform enabling international fans to watch Australian field hockey live and on demand for the first time. Following a record-breaking 2024 season, this global expansion opened new opportunities for the league.

Held from 10 October to 30 November 2025, the season brought together seven teams competing in both men’s and women’s divisions across Australia. With seven teams competing across multiple venues and matches streaming to global audiences for the first time, Hockey One needed technology that could capture, produce, and distribute content at unprecedented scale and speed.

Embracing the Digital Growth Opportunity

Season Five represented a pivotal moment for Hockey One: an opportunity to increase domestic and international audience growth, modernize digital storytelling, and ensure that every team and every athlete had a platform on the global stage.

With matches now reaching global audiences, traditional editorial workflows—requiring editors to manually monitor live feeds, identify key moments, clip footage, format content, and distribute across platforms—could not deliver the scale and speed this expansion demanded.

Hockey One deployed Spectatr.ai’s AI engine, PULSE, to automate real-time highlight generation across all competitions, enabling the content capacity required to support their strategic priorities.

Real-Time Highlights at Scale

Throughout the season, PULSE continuously monitored live match streams, automatically detecting key sporting moments such as goals, penalty corners, defensive saves, and shootout sequences. Within seconds, these moments were converted into ready-to-publish video clips enriched with metadata—including player names, teams, and contextual tags—and automatically formatted for both 16:9 and 9:16 distribution.

The content was delivered directly to Hockey One and made seamlessly accessible to all seven clubs. For the first time at this scale, every team received instant access to professional-quality highlights, enabling real-time engagement with fans nationwide and internationally. This unified approach to content distribution marked a significant shift—ensuring consistent digital visibility and storytelling standards across the league, while strengthening fan engagement at every club level.

Hockey One leveraged this capability to transform their digital strategy, empowering content teams to publish moments as they happened and deliver the instant, mobile-optimized content modern fans expect.

“The automation that we were able to achieve through SpectatrAI’s PULSE meant that we could push out short format match content across our digital channels almost as it happened. This drove a significant rise in engagement and metrics across all of our key digital platforms. In addition, having access to PULSE greatly assisted with our staff resourcing too – tasks that were manual in the past (i.e. highlights editing) became automated saving us hours of staff time.”, said Sash Herceg, Hockey One Executive Manager. 

Measurable Digital Impact During Hockey One 2025

9,500+ AI-powered clips generated: The AI-driven workflow produced clips over the 7-week season, with content published within seconds of key moments occurring.

10.6 million+ video views across platforms: Total views distributed across Facebook (4.3M), Instagram (4.9M), TikTok (1.2M), and YouTube (251K) during the season, demonstrating successful domestic and international reach expansion.

264% Facebook reach increase and 111% Instagram reach growth: Facebook video views surged 500%—performance Hockey One attributed to “the introduction of Spectatr.ai with goal clips posted in a timely fashion driving all social media statistics.” Instagram video views increased 199%.

308% YouTube views surge: Hockey One noted this was “achieved through Spectatr.ai automatically producing the highlight packages after each game to a high standard, something that we simply don’t have the human resources to do.”

9x growth in fan engagement: Total likes surged from 18,589 in 2024 to 170,154 in 2025, reflecting significantly deeper audience connection with the league’s content and demonstrating successful expansion of Hockey One’s footprint amongst new and existing audiences.

A Blueprint for Domestic League Digital Growth

The Hockey One partnership demonstrates how AI-powered automation enables sports organizations to achieve ambitious digital objectives without proportional resource investment. By handling time-intensive production tasks, the technology allows content teams to focus on creative storytelling and authentic fan engagement.

The results from Season Five establish a replicable framework: real-time AI serves as an equalizer, enabling leagues to achieve professional-grade digital engagement regardless of market size. Every moment reaches fans instantly, every team receives equal visibility, and organizations can scale their digital presence as they grow.

For domestic leagues navigating global expansion, the Hockey One League × Spectatr.ai partnership establishes a proven model: intelligent automation doesn’t replace human creativity—it amplifies it, enabling organizations to compete for international attention while maintaining authentic connections with local communities.