Four steps from raw phone footage to a sharable highlight reel. Every step explained — plus the reel types you can produce and who each one is for.
Create a profile with name, sport, position, jersey number, and graduation year.
The grad year is what tells our AI whether you're chasing college recruiting (HS class) or sharing with family (youth). Position drives play detection — the AI looks for QB scrambles for a QB, blocks for a center, intercepts for a netball goalkeeper. Add the athlete once; every upload from then on is linked to them.
Add an athlete →We accept three kinds of footage: short phone clips — one play each — practice footage, and full 60-90 min game tapes. MP4, MOV, AVI, or WebM up to 10 GB.
Short clips are the normal case, and they're the easy case: film one play, upload it, repeat — usually done processing in under a minute. Practice footage uploads the same way, with the same AI. The AI grades each clip and keeps it whole, so nothing gets cut mid-play. Long game tapes get the heavier treatment — chunking → dense frame extraction → scene classification → Whisper transcription of the commentary → scoreboard OCR → two-pass highlight detection — and you get a per-stage status on the dashboard while it runs. The AI breakdown itself takes about five minutes even on a two-hour tape — most of the wait is the upload and Mux transcode, and you can close the tab while it runs. A visible jersey number on the athlete materially improves detection — at high resolution the AI reads the number off the shirt, so add one on the athlete profile whenever you can. Either way, uploads stream straight to Mux in chunks, so they resume on dropped Wi-Fi and survive the iOS Safari multi-GB bug. Select several files at once — you can combine them into one highlight afterward.
Upload game film →Highlight, Recruiting Highlight, Game Tape, Coach Film, or Season Recap. Combine multiple games into one reel.
Each upload doesn't auto-publish a reel — you make a reel when you decide to. Hit "Make reel" on any analyzed upload, or use "Combine Multiple Games" to merge several. The wizard asks for a reel type (matches the audience: Highlight = vertical for IG/TikTok, Recruiting Highlight = landscape for coaches, Game Tape = long-form, etc.) and an athlete; we do the rest.
Combine games →One-tap copy link, social media buttons (TikTok / IG / X / YouTube), or download the MP4.
Every reel gets a share token + public viewer at /reel/{token}. On phones, our share button hooks into the native share sheet so "Save Video" drops the MP4 straight into your camera roll. Coaches can view the public reel without an account — we track their views so you know when your reel got seen.
Browse your reels →Reel type drives the format (vertical vs landscape) and the editing style. Pick by who you want to share it with.
For: Family, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts
Format: Vertical 9:16, 30-90 seconds, music + hook-first edit
The default share-worthy reel, and by far the most used — it's what nearly every reel on NextPlay gets watched as. It runs the same AI play detection coaches look for, just in the format families actually share. When you're ready to send it to a coach, open the reel and pick “Make the recruiting version” to rebuild it from the same games in 16:9.
For: College coaches, recruiting services
Format: Landscape 16:9, up to 20 plays, no music
Coaches watch on mute, so the AI drops the music entirely and orders the plays for impact. One tap from any Highlight you've already made.
For: Coaches, your team, post-game review
Format: Landscape 16:9, up to 30 minutes, every significant moment
Full game edit. Scoreboard reads, commentary transcribed, every play ranked.
For: Position coaches, scouting
Format: Landscape 16:9, up to 100 plays, exhaustive breakdown
Complete game-by-game breakdown with tagged moments.
For: End-of-season showcase, recruiting follow-up
Format: Landscape 16:9, multi-game compilation, narrative arc
Pulls the best from every game uploaded across the season.
NextPlay uploads a file from your device. There's no import-from-a-link — you'll need the actual video file first.
The most common source, and the one the AI is tuned for. Film one play per clip, hold the phone horizontal, and don't zoom — see the shooting tips below.
You need to download it from Hudl first, then upload the file here. On most accounts, film you uploaded yourself can be downloaded from the video's three-dot menu → Download Video. For team film, only coaches and team admins can download — ask your coach for the file, or buy the download from Hudl.
The parts of NextPlay people tend to find late.
Open any reel and tap Fine-tune to trim individual clips with a live preview, drag them into a different order, toggle slow-mo, change the transition, or swap the music. The AI's cut is a starting point, not a verdict.
If a reel's downloadable MP4 fails to build, it shows up in an amber card at the top of your dashboard with a Retry button. NextPlay also retries these on its own in the background.
Deleting a video moves it to Trash for 30 days, where you can restore it with one tap and no loss of quality. Reels you've already made from it keep working.
Group uploads into folders by game or season, then combine a whole folder into one reel in a single click. Reels get their own folders. Rename anything — the AI's generated names are just defaults.
On your best plays the AI writes a short “what happened / why it worked / next step” card. You'll find these on the Clips grid and the Development tab of a reel.
Each athlete gets a shareable public profile with their reels and season stats — one link you can hand to a coach or a grandparent.
Create a team, add a logo and colors, and tag uploads to it. Useful when you're filming more than one athlete.
NextPlay has native iOS and Android apps — upload from your camera roll, watch and share your reels, and get notified when analysis finishes.
Better raw footage = dramatically better highlights. Phone setup, framing, where to stand, and after-game labels.
See the 13 tipsSkip the intro, upload your first game film. The AI takes it from there.
Upload now