Faster, Fitter, Cheaper
Posted on Oct 21, 2024 by FEED Staff
With the adoption of AI becoming the norm across almost every link of the sports media production chain, FEED shares the latest developments
Words by Adrian Pennington
The sports broadcast industry is poised to surpass $60 billion this year, a significant increase from $56 billion in 2023 and $54 billion in 2022. With so much at stake, broadcasters are innovating to attract new viewers and engage more closely with existing fans.
A new study from IBM – ‘Global sports attitudes and behaviors’ – reveals a growing generational shift and acceptance of technology-driven experiences which will impact the future of sports consumption.
It argues that, by embracing digital transformation, adopting AI and data analytics, enhancing social media engagement and supporting multi-device viewing, broadcasters can stay ahead of the curve and meet the evolving needs of sports fans.
A primary area of innovation is the integration of advanced technologies into sports broadcasting. Innovations such as augmented reality and virtual reality are revolutionising the viewing experience by offering immersive and interactive content that brings fans closer to the action in ways previously unimaginable. AI and machine learning are also playing a critical role.
IBM’s study indicates that younger sports fans are more likely to favour AI-enhanced features as they increasingly turn to digital platforms for sports content. Nearly two-thirds (58%) of 18- to 29-year-olds believe AI will have a positive impact.
Automated content generation is another key enhancement that can ensure timely and relevant updates for fans and help broadcasters keep content fresh. AI tools can automatically generate highlights, summaries and other content, ensuring fans have access to the latest updates without delay.
In fact, AI in the sports market was valued at $1.4 billion in 2020 by IDC, and is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2030.
Pimping out Paris 2024
AI was used extensively by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) for the Paris Olympics to improve internal workflows, enhance the viewer experience, enrich storytelling and better explain the action. It would not have been possible to produce over 11,000 hours of content – equivalent to 450 days of content compressed into just 18 days – without it.
Automated highlights were produced for 14 sports in Paris, with many of the algorithms for more niche sports, like climbing, having been trained by OBS from previous Olympic events.
Another AI tool was used to assist editorial teams to quickly generate highlights and format them for different media, including vertical video for social feeds. These AI systems pulled data live from commentary, auto-tagged the video and created automated summaries.
“We do not allow AI systems to auto-publish stories, but it helps us to identify all the elements that make up good stories for posting to social media,” says OBS CEO Yiannis Exarchos.
AI-based motion-tracking technology also provided aid to commentators and viewers, keeping track of athletes’ positions during events like the canoe sprint, marathon and triathlon.
Automated enhancements
Greater visibility can make all the difference to club or league finances, particularly within niche or lower-tier sports where rights values are low, if they are sold at all.
Here, automated production systems are proving their worth. Pixellot’s system relies on PTZ cameras programmed to follow the on-field action using AI tracking. It can automatically generate clips of players who have scored, with functions processed in the cloud.
According to the company, more than 150,000 games are broadcast every month in around 80 countries across 19 sports. This data feeds and improves its AI to increase the quality of productions.
A rival solution from Dutch developer Studio Automated has covered over 100,000 sports matches with installations in 1500 locations globally. It is being used by Riedel Communications to build an AI-assisted video production solution. By joining forces, the companies aim to create a solution to enable sports productions and leagues to remotely produce live broadcasts with minimal personnel and operating costs.
Paul Valk, founder and director of Studio Automated, claims: “The maturity of our AI model enables us to serve clients that seek to automate production in the higher echelons of sports broadcasting.”
High-quality, slow-motion replays have required expensive specialist camera systems – until now. EVS has created the AI-based Xtramotion that allows production teams to transform any live or recorded footage into super slow-motion replays. The software drives other effects like deblurring, auto-cropping and shallow depth-of-field.
When using a facial tracking system, AI can be leveraged to accurately keep the talent in a specific frame and in focus. This frees up the camera operator’s time to prepare and frame the next shot.
AI-powered auto-tracking is rapidly becoming the standard in PTZ cameras. PTZ Optics’ new technology, Presenter Lock, allows its cameras to focus on and track a specific subject, even in crowded areas such as a sporting event or stage production. This technology leverages AI and computer vision, instead of the simple motion tracking used in previous generations of auto-tracking cameras.
Coaching and training
Even as the Paris Olympics close, sports federations are turning to technology to prepare the next generation of Olympic champions for the 2028 Games in LA. Pixellot claims its technology is transforming young athlete development at a scale unfathomable only years ago.
“By eliminating the requirement for manual filming, breaking down games and creating highlights, Pixellot allows coaches to spend time on what truly matters: guiding athletes to excel,” remarks Yossi Tarablus, associate VP of global marketing at Pixellot.
Pixellot’s AI-automated end-to-end solution provides coaches with ‘a treasure trove of video and data’, enabling identification of strengths and weaknesses as well as the creation of personalised game and training analysis.
“Our technology ensures that young talent from all backgrounds can be discovered,” adds Tarablus. “The platform’s video and data-driven approach helps federations and leagues refine their strategies by sharing and analysing game footage to uncover patterns and the stars of tomorrow. This level of insight is invaluable in the high-stakes environment of team sports.”
AI is gaining ground to plan and analyse football training. Around 10% of professional football clubs use data scouting at the moment –a number expected to explode in the coming years. “At some point, all leagues will have this data,” Daniel Memmert, managing director of the Institute for Training Science and Sports Informatics at the German Sport University Cologne, told sports body ISPO. “You can then click on a list of players with certain metrics the respective club considers important.”
As sensor data from the ball and players is now highly reliable, everything is tracked accurately. Tactical variables such as spatial control of individual players or entire teams and pressing values can be analysed in fractions of a second.
Shiver me timbers!
Piracy is an ever-present threat, with both sides taking AI to battle. Cyber criminals are utilising AI to create highlight clips of sports, which are then posted on TikTok to lure people into their illegal services.
“Pirates run sophisticated marketing organisations, and AI is making their fake content look as good as if it were created by someone like the BBC,” notes Tim Pearson, VP of global solutions and partner marketing at Nagra DTV. “What would have taken complex video editing to create a montage of the Olympic 100m final, featuring previous winners like Usain Bolt, can now be done relatively quickly with AI tools. It’s all done as a shameless promotion of an illicit service.”
He continues: “AI gives pirates many promotional benefits that they use to create better clips, driving traffic away from legal services. When content looks this professional, it dupes the consumer into thinking the site must be legitimate.”
Nagra is using AI to fight back. “AI locates illicitly shared content and confirms it’s our customer’s property. Previously, we scanned for patterns of activity; AI allows us to search much faster and for smaller patterns which may be focused in a particular location,” Pearson states.
“We are also able to apply smart enforcement with AI. If AI detects an infringement, perhaps by identifying a watermark, then the model now has enough intelligence to disrupt that pirate by instigating effective countermeasures.”
In July – with the 2024-25 football season still a month away – Nagra was already detecting piracy. “We are detecting as much, if not more, piracy during this summer of sport,” explains Pearson. “There is a massive amount of content ripe for picking, but AI is incredibly powerful for use in analytics, discovery, quantification and remediation.”
Commentary catalysed
Using AI, sports teams can connect with their fanbases in a far more effective fashion. Platforms like Veritone Voice synthetic voice AI technology facilitate real-time commentary and descriptions in various languages. A partnership between Veritone and Stats Perform’s Opta sports data offers not only lifelike voice options in a wide range of languages, but also voices like that of former pro footballer turned pundit Alan Smith. Smith had his voice fed into Opta Voice and can now virtually commentate on football games in multiple languages.
Similar solutions are provided by Elevenlabs, which is able to translate audio clips or the sound of videos into 29 languages to efficiently scale the localisation of content.
However, in the rush to expand reach, rightsholders are wary about introducing AI too soon, especially if the audience is not ready.
Wimbledon shelved the use of AI commentary for this year’s championships following criticism of the emotionless feature in 2023.The model was trained to read tennis matches and was only used for highlight commentary on Wimbledon’s website for matches on the outside courts, where live human commentary was not in place. It was criticised by broadcaster Annabel Croft and others for being robotic.
The AI-powered audio provided by Wimbledon’s data partner IBM will continue to be used at the US Open, as well as golf’s Masters tournament, but may only reappear at the All England Club if the tech sees improvement.
That said, Wimbledon and IBM continued to employ AI to deliver a new mobile app intended to boost editorial coverage on the website. Catch Me Up was built using IBM’s Granite LLM to provide AI-generated text, subsequently being trained to mimic the Wimbledon editorial style. The Club also used generative AI to serve coverage of a broader range of matches than ever before, including wheelchair events.
Monetising the archive
Advances in AI-powered digital asset management provide numerous opportunities for sports organisations to make the most of their content. AI platforms make this possible through metadata tagging, content management and e-commerce capabilities.
“Past broadcasts and events hold significant value,” says Gary Warech, head of sports and entertainment at Veritone. “Through GenAI, archives can be rejuvenated and showcased with curated highlight reels, nostalgic montages or other audio and video content types. This approach both revitalises past content and helps carve out avenues for sustained revenue generation via sponsorships or licensing opportunities.”
Sports organisations can gain insights into their content through transcribed audio, logos, facial recognition and other AI cognitive engines. NFL team San Francisco Giants described this speed and visibility into its archive with AI content management as having its own ‘personalised YouTube.’
AI is used in MAM systems closer to production, as seen in EVS’s Mediaception Signature solution. Its natural language search capabilities enable non-technical users to locate content.
“With AI, the potential to cater to diverse market segments –ranging from editorial teams and advertisers to the direct fanbase – is exponentially magnified,” adds Warech. “But it’s more than just a direct fan-engagement tool. It serves as a means to do more with existing and future content, creating new content forms while extracting greater value from an archive.”
New AI-powered content recommendation systems and advertising tools are opening more revenue streams. For example, AI/ML models dynamically identify the best spots on-screen to deliver ads. “This is important as viewers don’t want to be diverted away from the main event and forced to watch full-screen ads,” details Nitin Jain, managing partner at Skandha Media Services. The company developed the Evince ad-verification tool for one of the largest OTT providers in India, which currently owns the rights to stream a marquee cricket tournament in India.
“For live sports streams that may be firing hundreds or thousands of ads over the full length of a live event, providing consistent and accurate data has been challenging,” Jain admits. “The human resources needed to accomplish this level of verification just isn’t viable. We introduced ML to automate the process – training cameras to identify and capture ad elements.”
It’s an AI future
Metahumans, or digital doubles, might change the face of sports broadcasts. During the 2022 Fifa World Cup, animated replays created in Unreal Engine from official Opta match data showed new angles of play not captured by broadcast cameras. The AI-powered results – displayed on TUDN, the highlights show of broadcaster Televisa Univision – proved popular.
SMPTE noted that the gamification of the event made it more accessible for those who normally wouldn’t be into the sport. However, it also observed in a recent paper that the technique is expensive, which could explain why it hasn’t caught on with fans. Despite this, SMPTE suggests that, in the future, fans could rewatch games of their favourite sports from angles never thought possible.
This feature was first published in the Autumn 2024 issue of FEED.
