​

The FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series global final 2026, branded as Project Redwings, concluded at the West Bund Art Center in Shanghai on Sunday, with the French team claiming the title.

As a Level 8 event — the highest tier in FIBA’s 3×3 competition system, on par with the Olympic women’s 3×3 tournament — the tournament gathered eight top women’s teams from seven countries and offered crucial ranking points to qualify for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

France defeated Romania’s Rapid Bucharest 22-14 in the final to claim the title, with the Netherlands finishing third. Laetitia Guapo of France was named tournament MVP, while Li Ruoying from Team Beijing took home the Young Talent’s Laura Award, honoring the event’s best under-25 player.

Running alongside the tournament was the FIBA 3×3 promotion week, the week-long program, launched on Aug 29, featured a university league, street park challenges, a trendy sports market, and art events.

A FIBA 3×3 global development seminar was held concurrently. Alex Sanchez Mollinger, the managing director of FIBA 3×3, noted that Shanghai’s strong event hosting capacity, public cultural infrastructure, and vibrant urban development create solid conditions for top-tier international sports events.

Organizers said they will continue to expand 3×3 basketball into campuses, communities, and commercial districts, supporting Shanghai’s goal of building a world-renowned sports city.

The FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series global final 2026, branded as Project Redwings, concluded at the West Bund Art Center in Shanghai on Sunday, with the French team claiming the title.

As a Level 8 event — the highest tier in FIBA’s 3×3 competition system, on par with the Olympic women’s 3×3 tournament — the tournament gathered eight top women’s teams from seven countries and offered crucial ranking points to qualify for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

France defeated Romania’s Rapid Bucharest 22-14 in the final to claim the title, with the Netherlands finishing third. Laetitia Guapo of France was named tournament MVP, while Li Ruoying from Team Beijing took home the Young Talent’s Laura Award, honoring the event’s best under-25 player.

Running alongside the tournament was the FIBA 3×3 promotion week, the week-long program, launched on Aug 29, featured a university league, street park challenges, a trendy sports market, and art events.

A FIBA 3×3 global development seminar was held concurrently. Alex Sanchez Mollinger, the managing director of FIBA 3×3, noted that Shanghai’s strong event hosting capacity, public cultural infrastructure, and vibrant urban development create solid conditions for top-tier international sports events.

Organizers said they will continue to expand 3×3 basketball into campuses, communities, and commercial districts, supporting Shanghai’s goal of building a world-renowned sports city.

Team USA women’s basketball has several college stars to thank for its latest gold medal.

On June 7, the USA women’s basketball 3×3 roster secured gold with a 21-20 win over Australia at the FIBA 3×3 World Cup in Warsaw, Poland.  The victory comes after a gritty 19-18 overtime win over Azerbaijan in the semifinals.  The winning group included South Carolina’s Joyce Edwards, LSU’s Mikaylah Williams and MiLaysia Fulwiley, plus Oklahoma forward Saraha Williams.

Advertisement

Since the event began in 2012, the American women have medaled five times, including four gold medals (2012, 2014, 2023, 2026) and one bronze (2016).

Mikaylah Williams, who made the game-winning basket to push the USA out in front, also walked away with MVP honors. She scored a team-high nine points in the matchup. Mikaylah led the team in scoring with 6.6 points per matchup a joined Cameron Brink (2023) as the only other American woman to take home an MVP award.

“I’m blessed to be on this stage, to play with some amazing teammates, to play for some amazing coaches and to rep USA,,” Williams said postgame.

Edwards, a star at South Carolina, has the led Gamecocks to two national title games. The 6-foot-3 forward was a consensus All-American as a sophomore this past season, averaging 19.2 points, 6.8 rebounds, 2.4 assists, 1.8 steals and 1.1 blocks per game while shooting 57.1% from the floor.

Advertisement

Mikaylah Williams has started in 105 of the 106 games she’s played at LSU and was named to first-team All-SEC for a second time this past season. Over her career, Mikaylah has averaged 15.4 points, 4.9 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game while shooting 39.3% from 3-point range.

Edwards and Fulwiley previously played together at South Carolina during the 2024-25 season before Fulwiley transferred to LSU, where she plays alongside Mikaylah Williams. Fulwiley has won the SEC’s Sixth Player of the Year twice and has also been named to an All-Region team in the NCAA Tournament twice. Last season, Fulwiley averaged 14.6 points, 3.6 rebounds, 3.5 assists, 2.8 steals and 1.4 blocks per game.

Sahara Williams averaged 12.4 points, 7.9 rebounds and 3.8 assists per game while shooting 46.1% from the floor this past season for the Sooners. She helped Oklahoma make the Sweet 16 during the 2026 NCAA Tournament, where the Sooners fell to Edwards and South Carolina.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: South Carolina, LSU stars lead Team USA women to FIBA 3×3 World Cup gold

FIBA granted L1VE exclusive immersive live rights to its three flagship 3×3 basketball properties in a three-year agreement announced from Mies, Switzerland on August 25, 2026, with the first deployment scheduled for a World Tour stop in Hungary four days later.

The International Basketball Federation has licensed a category of media right that did not exist as a line item three years ago. According to FIBA, the agreement with L1VE covers the FIBA 3×3 World Tour, the FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series and the FIBA 3×3 World Cup, and runs for three seasons. No financial terms were disclosed. No minimum event count was published. The announcement was issued at 4:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, August 25, 2026.

What makes the deal worth the attention of media buyers is not the property. 3×3 basketball is a small discipline by rights-fee standards, well below the football and North American league packages that anchor most sports media plans. What matters is the structure. FIBA has carved a fourth distribution window out of its inventory and sold it separately, on an exclusive basis, to a company that owns both the capture technology and the consumer relationship at the other end of it.

What the agreement covers

According to FIBA, immersive live rights constitute a new class of media rights that allows 3×3 events to open an additional platform complementing existing broadcast and streaming activities. The federation frames the arrangement as additive rather than substitutive. Nothing in the announcement indicates that any broadcast or streaming partner loses anything as a result.

The stated purpose is reach into an audience that conventional distribution does not serve well. FIBA describes the platform as creating an engagement opportunity for fans who cannot be inside the venue, giving them a different way to experience the live event. That framing places the product closer to a ticket than to a broadcast, which turns out to be exactly how it is sold.

Alex Sanchez, FIBA’s 3×3 Basketball Managing Director, stated: “3×3 basketball was built to bring the game closer to the fans. Working with L1VE over the next three seasons, we are exploring new ways for audiences around the world to experience the intensity and energetic setting of our events.”

Over the course of the three-year agreement, according to FIBA, the platform will be rolled out across the federation’s flagship 3×3 events. The World Tour is the men’s professional circuit, the Women’s Series its counterpart, and the World Cup the national-team competition. The release does not specify how many events within each property are covered, whether coverage is global or territory-limited, or what happens to the rights at Olympic events, where the International Olympic Committee rather than FIBA controls distribution.

How the capture and delivery stack works

L1VE was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in New York, with research and development in Germany. According to the company, it owns a proprietary glass-to-glass technology stack and a direct-to-fan platform, and it positions itself as the originator of immersive live rights as a licensable category.

The technical description in the announcement is specific in parts and vague in others. According to L1VE, its technology captures a full venue of live experience in stereoscopic 360-degree 3D, a real-time pipeline fuses that capture into a single live scene, and a custom delivery layer keeps every fan worldwide present at the same moment. The company states that the platform runs on every major immersive headset and scales like software, with one production reaching every fan at once.

That last claim carries the commercial weight. Conventional live sports production scales by adding output: separate feeds for separate broadcasters, separate commentary tracks, separate graphics packages, separate regional advertising breaks. Production capacity is a physical constraint on how much premium live inventory exists in any given week, a point visible in the specification of the outside broadcast units now entering service across European markets, where a single vehicle carries 24 cameras expandable to 48. A single-production model that serves an unbounded audience inverts that arithmetic, at least in principle. The announcement provides no concurrency figure, no bandwidth requirement and no latency measurement against which the claim can be tested.

Nor does it name a single headset. “Every major immersive headset” is asserted without a device list, an operating system requirement or a minimum specification, and no install-base figure appears anywhere in the source material. Fans access the experience by downloading the L1VE app on a compatible virtual reality headset.

Debrecen is the first live test

L1VE will be in action for the first time under the FIBA agreement at the 3×3 World Tour event in Debrecen, Hungary on August 29 and 30, 2026. That is four days after the announcement, an unusually short runway between a rights announcement and its first execution.

The commercial model is ticketing, not advertising. According to L1VE, tickets are available for a single day of competition or as a tournament pass covering the full event, in the same way a fan would buy a ticket to attend in person. No price points appear in the announcement. No revenue split between the federation and the platform is disclosed.

Social mechanics sit at the centre of the product. Fans can invite friends to watch alongside them regardless of location, and the company describes the experience as designed to be shared, with viewers reacting to play alongside the friends they have invited. L1VE markets the underlying capability as Social Presence.

David Morgenbesser, Chief Commercial Officer at L1VE, commented: “3×3 basketball is one of the most thrilling urban sports in the world. One court, non-stop, right in your face. That makes it a natural fit for L1VE. Over the next three years, we want to give fans a new way to be there, courtside, inside the atmosphere and sharing the real game with the people they want beside them, wherever they are in the world.”

An inconsistency in the launch sequence

The source material carries a small chronological discrepancy worth noting. The FIBA announcement states that the platform has already been used for major live sport and music events internationally, and that it pre-launched with the Detroit Lions on August 22. A separate L1VE announcement in the same newsroom states that L1VE events launch on August 1, beginning with a Real Madrid friendly against Fiorentina available only through the platform.

An August 22 pre-launch sitting three weeks after an August 1 launch, and after a stated history of international deployments, does not resolve cleanly. The company has not published an event log, so the number of productions delivered before the FIBA agreement cannot be established from the available documents. According to L1VE, the Detroit Lions named the company their Official Immersive Partner, with fans able to experience games from inside the stadium starting with the preseason fixture at Ford Field on August 22.

No advertising layer, yet

For marketers, the most consequential feature of the announcement is an absence. There is no advertising product here. No inventory is described, no format is named, no measurement partner is identified, no sponsorship position is offered. The revenue mechanism disclosed is consumer payment for access.

That places the product in the same commercial family as the direct-to-consumer subscription launches that have accumulated through 2026. USA TODAY Sports began charging $39.99 a year for fantasy football tools on August 11, and MS NOW opened a paid membership at $7.99 a month on August 19, both routing next-dollar revenue through a paid relationship rather than an impression. A ticketed headset feed follows the same logic applied to a live rights holder rather than a publisher.

The gap is not necessarily permanent. Courtside virtual positions, branded environments, half-time takeovers and hoarding replacement are all technically available to a stack that composites a venue into a single synthetic scene. None of them is mentioned. Whether L1VE intends to open commercial positions, and on what terms, is not addressed in the announcement, and no rate card exists for a category with no measured audience.

Where this sits in the live sports economy

Live sport has become the contested ground in video advertising, and the figures behind that contest are well documented. Gracenote research found that sports content reached 5% of all programming across the six leading global subscription services in the second quarter of 2026, close to a tripling of the 1.4% share recorded in November 2024. Video Advertising Bureau research found NFL streaming reaching 76% of streaming sports viewers, up from 72% two years earlier, with WNBA viewership up 56% across the same interval. Nielsen’s 2026 upfront planning guide placed streaming at 66.7% of ad-supported television time among adults aged 18 to 49, with sports at close to 30% of ad-supported viewing in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Rights holders have responded by lengthening and layering their deals rather than simplifying them. Amazon extended UEFA Champions League rights to 2031 in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, and its advertising leadership has described Prime Video and live sports as a single full-funnel business rather than two inventory pools. The buying rails have adapted alongside: Disney opened real-time bidding on live streaming inventory to four platforms, and Magnite documented bid-volume handling for live football in March 2026.

Every one of those developments assumes a screen that a measurement panel can observe. A headset does not qualify. Free ad-supported streaming television is counted, imperfectly, and so are FAST channels and the vMVPD services that sit beside them. Immersive viewing appears in none of the currencies that settle television money. Nielsen’s monthly Gauge divides watch-time between broadcast, cable, streaming and a residual category for other uses of the television set, and the industry spent the first half of 2026 arguing over the weighting inside that instrument rather than over what it fails to capture at all.

Why 3×3, and why now

The choice of property is legible. According to FIBA, 3×3 was played for the first time in international competition at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, added yearly professional circuits for men and women, and made its Olympic debut at the Tokyo 2020 Games. Games are played by two teams of three on a half-court, with a single basket.

Three structural features make it convenient for a fixed-position immersive capture. The playing area is half the size of a full court, so a single vantage point covers the entire field of play. The format is continuous, which removes the editorial decisions that multi-camera direction exists to make. And events are staged as temporary urban builds rather than in permanent arenas, which means the venue can be configured around the capture rather than the reverse.

Scale is the trade. A property with modest broadcast revenue can license an experimental window without endangering an existing contract. Comparable exclusivity on a football or NFL package would require unwinding rights already sold. The federation is, in effect, supplying a low-risk testbed, and the platform is supplying the technology and the consumer billing relationship.

What neither party has supplied is evidence. No audience figure from the Real Madrid fixture, the Detroit Lions preseason game or any prior deployment appears in the source material. Until one does, the size of the category is a matter of assertion rather than measurement, and the first FIBA data point arrives from Debrecen on August 29.

Timeline

• 2010 – 3×3 basketball is played for the first time in international competition at the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore
• 2020 – 3×3 makes its Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games
• 2022 – L1VE is founded, headquartered in New York with research and development in Germany
• November 23, 2025 – Amazon extends UEFA Champions League rights in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy to 2031
• March 12, 2026 – Nielsen’s 2026 upfront planning guide places streaming at 66.7% of ad-supported television time among adults 18 to 49
• March 26, 2026 – The Video Advertising Bureau accuses Nielsen of suppressing the February Gauge report
• May 22, 2026 – Gracenote finds sports at 5% of programming across the six leading global subscription services
• June 30, 2026 – Video Advertising Bureau research records NFL streaming reach at 76% and WNBA viewership up 56%
• August 1, 2026 – L1VE states that its events launch, beginning with a Real Madrid friendly against Fiorentina
• August 11, 2026 – USA TODAY Sports launches a fantasy product at $39.99 a year
• August 19, 2026 – MS NOW opens a paid membership at $7.99 a month
• August 20, 2026 – NEP announces EU-01, a 24-camera outside broadcast unit, for ESPN’s Eredivisie coverage
• August 22, 2026 – L1VE states it pre-launched with the Detroit Lions at the preseason fixture at Ford Field
• August 25, 2026 – FIBA and L1VE announce the exclusive three-year immersive live rights agreement from Mies, Switzerland
• August 29 and 30, 2026 – The first FIBA 3×3 World Tour event under the agreement takes place in Debrecen, Hungary

Summary

Who: FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, and L1VE, a company founded in 2022 and headquartered in New York with research and development in Germany. Alex Sanchez, FIBA’s 3×3 Basketball Managing Director, and David Morgenbesser, Chief Commercial Officer at L1VE, are quoted in the announcement.

What: An exclusive immersive live rights agreement covering the FIBA 3×3 World Tour, the FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series and the FIBA 3×3 World Cup, running three years. Fans access the coverage by downloading the L1VE app on a compatible virtual reality headset, buying either a single-day ticket or a tournament pass. No financial terms, audience figures or advertising formats were disclosed.

When: Announced at 4:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on August 25, 2026. The first event under the agreement is the FIBA 3×3 World Tour stop in Debrecen on August 29 and 30, 2026.

Where: Issued from Mies, Switzerland. The first deployment takes place in Debrecen, Hungary, with the agreement covering FIBA 3×3 events worldwide.

Why: FIBA describes immersive live rights as a class of media right that complements broadcast and streaming rather than replacing either, aimed at fans who cannot attend in person. For the advertising market, the significance lies in a rights holder separating and selling a fourth distribution window that currently carries no measured audience and no commercial inventory.

WARSAW, Poland — Former Parkway Panthers and current LSU Tigers star Mikaylah Williams helped Team USA win gold at the FIBA 3×3 World Cup in Poland, Sunday.

This is the women’s fourth gold medal in the competition as they beat Australia, 21-20, in the final.

Williams took home the tournament MVP after hitting the game-winning shot in the gold medal game and led Team USA in points per game (6.6).

Fellow LSU teammate Milaysia Fulwiley led the team with nine points in the final.