Highlight Reel Generator for High School Athletes

The Problem

Recruiting still runs on a two-minute tape. Parents pay $500–$2,000 for a local editor to hand-cut a season. Ideabrowser's community pull: about 500,000 families in that spend band, and 74% of parents in the Reddit sample said they would use a cheaper automatic reel. r/YouthSports (50k) is full of "does anyone know an editor who won't take six weeks." r/VideoEditing (248k) is the supply side — freelancers who do not want another $150 soccer job.

Hudl already sits on 14 million-plus users. They can ship native AI tomorrow. That is the existential risk, not Magisto. Until they do, the tape is still a dad with a phone on a stick and a weekend in Premiere.

Soccer first. The field is a rectangle, the ball is a high-contrast object, and club culture already shares Hudl links. Football and basketball come after the first 200 paying families.

The Solution

Upload the game. Get a 90-second reel with the touches that look like recruiting film — not a random "best moments" montage with stock music. $29 a reel or $149 a season in the one-liner; the ladder that actually matches weekend-MVP math is a free first game, then $15/month unlimited or $5–$15 per game.

How it works:

1. Ingest — Parent or coach drops a 90-minute file or a YouTube/Hudl URL. Jersey number + team color are required. No "we'll figure out who you are."
2. Detect + rank — Player tracking + ball events (shots, take-ons, saves). Rank clips by coach-shaped rules: successful action + camera stability + duration, not just "fast motion."
3. Reel + share — 60–120 second cut, captions, a clean end card with grad year and position. One-tap share to Hudl, X, and the club group chat. Season pass concatenates across games.

Market Research

Video-editor software: $1,009.66 million in 2026 to $1,449.55 million by 2035 (4.1% CAGR). That is the mature NLE market. AI video editing: $0.9 billion in 2023 to $4.4 billion by 2033 (17.2%). AI video generators: about $1.5 billion by 2029 at ~20% CAGR. Youth-sports highlights are a sliver — and that is why the big NLEs ignore the jersey-number form.

Vitrina's 2026 AI sports-video note is the category timing: broadcasters already automate multi-cam highlights. The leftover is the $0 consumer who has one camera and a kid who needs a tape by Tuesday.

r/sports at 18.9 million is noise. Sell in club Slack, TeamSnap, and the Hudl comments. 74% "interested" is a Reddit number — treat it as a waitlist conversion target, not a TAM.

Hudl integration is both distribution and the kill shot. Build export-to-Hudl on day one so you look like a plugin. If they clone you, you already have the email list.

Legal: youth likeness. Parent is the account. Coach can upload but cannot publish without the parent toggle. Do not scrape Hudl. Do not train on the files. If a club asks for a team seat, that is the $149 season SKU times 18 — still cheaper than one editor.

Competitive Landscape

• Magisto (Vimeo) — from $4.99/month. Generic auto-edit. No jersey lock.
• Splice — about $4.99/month. Mobile cuts for creators, not recruiting film.
• Filmora — free + subscription / perpetual. Template highlight maker. Parent still picks the clips.
• InVideo — free limited, paid for watermark-off. Same template problem.
• Hudl — team subscriptions. The platform of record. No consumer "make my kid's reel tonight" SKU that is good.
• Premiere Rush / Canva Video — manual substitutes. This is what the $500 editor is replacing.

Your Opportunity

Free "how coaches read a tape" guide → first game free → $15/month unlimited or $5–$15/game → $12/month annual → $500+/season custom (human cleanup, music rights, multiple positions). Magisto will not add jersey ID. Hudl might — so your brand has to be "the recruiting reel," not "AI video."

Business Model

Unit economics:

• GPU / API per 90-minute 1080p ingest: budget $1–$3; price the per-game SKU at $9 to stay 3x
• Season $15/month only works if most families upload 2–4 games, not 40
• Club coach as the multiplier: one coach, 18 families

Do not build a marketplace for editors. That is the $500 problem you are deleting.

Recommended Tech Stack

• App: Next.js 15 + a Python worker (Modal or Fly) for the model
• Auth / billing: Clerk + Stripe ($15 sub + per-game checkout)
• Storage: Mux or Cloudflare Stream for ingest + playback
• DB: Supabase — athletes, games, clips, reels
• Models: off-the-shelf player tracking (e.g. RF-DETR / ByteTrack) + a ball detector; Claude only for the end-card copy
• Share: Hudl link paste + native MP4 download

AI Prompts to Build This

Copy and paste these into Claude, Cursor, or your favorite AI tool.

1. Project Setup

Create a Next.js 15 + Stripe app for high-school highlight reels.
 
Set up:
- Clerk family accounts (parent owns the athlete profile)
- Supabase: athletes (jersey, color, grad year, position), games, clips, reels
- Mux ingest from file upload
- $0 first game, then $9/game or $15/month
 
No social network. One athlete, many games.

2. Core Feature

Build the detect + rank pipeline.
 
Requirements:
- Parent enters jersey number and team color before upload
- Worker tracks that player and ball events (shot, take-on, save)
- Rank clips by successful action + stability + duration
- Assemble a 90-second reel with captions and a grad-year end card
 
User flow: create athlete → upload game → pick 8 of 20 suggested clips → export.

3. Season Compilation

Add a season pass that concatenates the top 20 clips across games into a 2-minute recruiting tape, with a chapter per game. Export MP4 and a Hudl-ready link. Charge $149 if they are not already on $15/month.

Sources

• Vitrina — AI sports video 2026
• Gudsho — video editing stats
• Industry Research — video editor market
• Filmora highlight maker
• Magisto
• Hudl
• Splice
• r/YouthSports