How Chess.com cut subclip turnaround by 90% with Hiscale FLICS

Chess has been played for over 1,500 years. Today, an estimated 600 million people worldwide play the game. Chess.com alone has 260+ million registered members, with 20+ million games played on the platform every day. In 2025, the top three most watched broadcasts had close to 2 million viewers each. Behind every one of those broadcasts, there are moments that must be re-shared while the moment is right.

Ben Attias, the Senior Systems Manager for Media at Chess.com, explained that the problems in subclipping rise as video file sizes grow. It is commonplace in their operation to record six-hour events with program feeds and ISO feeds from up to 25+ cameras during a major tournament. Editors may only need a few seconds from those files, but they would have to download the full video, drop it into Premiere, cut a clip, and re-upload.

For a globally distributed remote team, that meant downloading large files over home internet. Some editors in Asia and the Middle East were waiting so long for downloads that they risked missing the window of relevance for a clip. And when that was the case, the clip just wouldn’t be used.

A cloud-native operation that needed more speed

Chess.com's media operation is cloud-native. Storage spans multiple regions and buckets. The team works remotely across continents. Their MAM, Iconik, holds over a half million assets and hundreds of terabytes of content, with hundreds of thousands of hours archived.

During a major event, a lot of lengthy videos land in storage in a short window, and editors need to pull short pieces out of them fast.

The cloud-native setup gave Chess.com the right foundation. What they still needed was a way to act on that content without dragging the full file down from the cloud first.

Why FLICS made sense

Ben's team had heard about the Hiscale FLICS integration with Iconik and how they could trigger FLICS workflows via Iconik custom actions. The team already lived in Iconik, and anything new had to fit in there.

FLICS plugged directly into Iconik. Editors wouldn't have to learn anything new. They'd keep doing what they already did in the MAM.

The invisible subclip workflow that worked 

The team built the FLICS subclipping workflow as an automation. Here’s how it works:

1. An editor marks an in and out point on an hour-long file in Iconik to create a subclip.

2. Behind the scenes, FLICS transcodes just that clip into the defined specs.

3. The new sub-clip asset appears in Iconik with relations to the parent file.

"We don't want our users to even know this exists," Ben said. "We just want a button."

That's the goal of any good transcoding engine — to do what needs to be done without drawing attention away from other work.

The team rolled the FLICS integration out during Candidates, the tournament leading up to the world championship, when short-form output is at its peak. Adoption was immediate. Editors from across the global team picked it up the same week. Internal feedback was very positive. One editor remarked, "I don't have to download a 9GB file ever again just for 20 seconds."

The numbers

• Clip creation time: 15 minutes to 2 minutes. Nearly a 90% reduction per subclip. For an average week of 60 subclips, that compresses a 20-hour workload into 2 hours.

• Egress cost per clip: By not pulling a full 9GB file and only the subclip, there is a 97% drop in egress variable data costs, with savings compounding as master files grow.

There's a creative win too. Non-technical team members, people who used to wait on an editor to clip something, can now do it themselves with a click. So, beyond making content faster, even more content is being made.

What's next

Chess.com is building more FLICS workflows on top of the same foundation. A broadcast-spec template that stitches a YouTube post-roll onto clips for on-air promos. A vertical transcode for short-form social. A WebM profile for the design team's internal pipeline. These are all possibilities on the horizon now.

For a remote-first esports operation moving at the speed of social, that flexibility is the difference between content getting out or getting archived.