Across every industry we cover at Puck—entertainment, sports, fashion, the media, finance, etcetera—business leaders are feverishly racing to wrap their heads around how A.I. is changing the way we do business. To illuminate the shifts that are already underway (and those on the horizon), I sat down with a number of our resident domain experts for a new series, presented by Meta, to discover what they’re hearing from industry insiders.
In the first of four special conversations, Puck’s veteran sports correspondent John Ourand broke down the numerous ways that A.I. is altering the sports business landscape—in broadcasting, media rights battles, sports betting, and much more.
Baratunde Thurston: You’ve been reporting on the business of sports for decades now. So tell me, as someone so close to the action and the mechanisms that underpin the industry, how A.I. has impacted the field?
John Ourand: You can point to a few things, but A.I. has pretty dramatically changed how television production works, especially since the pandemic. When companies started sending people back to work in person—live broadcasts obviously require people to be on set—a lot of functions remained remote. There has also been a major push for cost-savings as a result of A.I., which has led to a lot of job cuts in production.
You can really see the jump in capabilities by comparing the way the Summer Olympics has changed over the past four years. For this year’s Games, the main producer didn’t even go to Paris. She was able to produce the Games from Stamford, Connecticut. That wasn’t solely due to A.I., but it was a major component.
I love the idea of a highly personalized, video-centric sports experience for fans that’s seamlessly compiled by A.I. But something like that requires more than just technology, right? Among other things, there are rights and legal considerations. How do those factor in?
Well, even before generative A.I. took off, ESPN and other networks operated with the understanding that their highlight rights have actual news value. For instance, say you have a highlight of an NFL game—there’s an inherent news value to those video clips that can be leveraged within their news programs. But there are still many unanswered questions when it comes to the relationship between A.I. and those highlight rights.
That said, ESPN pays the NFL more than any other TV network for its rights, which allows them to show NFL plays all week long. It’s the same thing with Major League Baseball. I’m sure the leagues are going to start trying to get a little bit more out of these deals, and A.I. might play a role there.Are there any less obvious, behind-the-scenes places for automation and A.I. to play a role in sports?
A prime example is the brand-new Los Angeles Clippers arena. There’s facial recognition to enter; they know whether or not you have a ticket on you so you don’t have to wait in line; they know that you like to drink a Miller Lite and generally buy a hot dog. Some of that is merely data science, but it can integrate with A.I. in important ways.
One of the fever dreams of all the leagues is that Netflix or Amazon take the rights, and with one press of a button, those streams can be consumed globally. Amazon is really close to implementing real-time announcers that can speak any language—not just speech-to-text, but instantly translated audio that keeps the same intonation and excitement. (Check out some of the incredible work that OpenAI has already done with instantly translated audio conversations.) It’s not quite feasible to roll this stuff out at scale, at least not yet, but these are the areas that these streaming companies are really taking a look at to try to grow their businesses internationally.
As players are increasingly being tracked with in-game cameras and other types of A.I.-equipped wearables, how do you think the integration of biometrics, player data, and individual video streams can change the ways media companies approach the storytelling of sports?
Well, it makes the action so much easier to follow. There are already some niche sports streamers, like F1 TV, that allow you to toggle between different cameras and views. The NBA, PGA Tour, and MLB have all rolled out apps for Apple Vision Pro, where you can watch games in a fully immersive, three-dimensional space, where users can actually control the display and stats they’re seeing. It makes it easier to bet on the games, too: Think about all the ways that personalized feeds and player data can deepen that experience.
But I think the main thing that teams and players like is that it really helps the competition. Look at the NFL, for instance—once or twice a year, CBS simulcasts an NFL game on Nickelodeon, and Nickelodeon gets their own announcers and real-time production crew. The idea behind that is that it’s going to draw more kids to the NFL, and that, hopefully, they become lifelong fans. Disney bought Fox’s entertainment asset, so it owns The Simpsons. And this year, they’re gonna have The Simpsons Funday Football game. They know the core NFL fan is going to be watching the regular channel, but they’re experimenting with different channels and experiences to target different kinds of fans.
That’s just the beginning of what we’re eventually going to see in terms of how the experience of these games—everything from the announcers to the language—can be personalized and packaged.Obviously, A.I. is going to radically change so many things about our day-to-day lives, but many have considered sports as one possible arena—pun intended—that might be a holdout, just because the viewing experience is, fundamentally, about peak human performance. Do you agree with that?
I agree, and I don’t think that’s going to change. The really high-end, important games—like the Super Bowl—are always going to have celebrity sports commentators, too. I don’t think anybody wants to hear an A.I. voice in those moments. But like athletes, the talent ecosystem on the production side is becoming a winner-take-all environment, and they’re going to find places to cut costs elsewhere. And A.I. is going to help on the customer-acquisition, retention, and advertising side, too.
Where you’re really going to start to see this stuff being deployed isn’t the “game of the week” in the NBA; it’s a hypothetical midweek Bowling Green State versus Ohio Wesleyan basketball game that just so happens to be on air. That’s when they’ll mess around with different scripts, robot cameras, different ad insertions, etcetera, just to make it more automated. There are areas in sports that are ripe for A.I. to come in and make things easier, but I’m still skeptical, in the short term, that anything’s going to happen to any of the big events, especially the NFL. If you want to see the future in action, watch the games and leagues where broadcasters really need to cut costs and create value. That’s where they’re going to be more willing to start experimenting.
