From discovery to content creation and more, AI will transform sports TV
By Paul Pastor
Not gonna lie – it’s an exhilarating time to be a sports fan! On the field and in the arena, MLB’s best are battling toward the World Series championship, the NFL cream is rising to the top, MLS soccer playoffs are around the corner, and every NBA and NHL team is filled with the expectation and promise of the new season.
In the living room, the stars increasingly are the new technologies that are creating new opportunities for the industry. The rise of direct-to-consumer strategies and the power of Generative AI are giving teams, leagues and rightsholders new power – to expand to new markets and to deliver to those fans a turbocharged portfolio of content and discovery options.
In recent months OTT innovation has accelerated at the speed of sport. YES Network’s award-winning new platform and MSG Networks’ MSG+ have helped the two premiere regional sports services add new D2C reach to their existing cable presences. Across the Pacific, Cignal TV’s Pilipinas Live is delivering Filipino sports to audiences in-country and around the world. And Rogers Sports & Media’s Sportsnet SN NOW continues to build on a launch that has spurred immediate results in unique views per month, average minutes watched per stream, and average monthly sales.
Cloud-native, open-architected platforms allow all of these truly differentiated services to keep pace with waves of technology change and consumer expectations, so that each individual viewer is engaged and monetized. The next step is harnessing the power of Generative AI marketplaces to extend the reach and power of search, discovery and content availability – an opportunity limited only by the imagination.
Our proof of concept last month combined our video CMS, voice commands, and Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable hyper-accurate content discovery, personalized recommendations, relevant statistics and information, and interactive quizzes. Using iterative, conversational queries that sharpen services’ AI smarts with each question, Generative AI could drive better, faster and less costly delivery of:
- Highlight reels that condense the best moments from the latest game for the growing number of consumers with limited screen time.
- Immediate access to web-based highlights of the greatest video moment in sport, from Willie Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch 70 Septembers ago to Maradona’s “hand of God” goal and – well, just about any Tom Brady moment.
- Enriched search and recommendation that leverages LLMs to seek and find content that often eludes the discovery capabilities of traditional metadata models.
- Feature-length content that uses AI to compile sports action clips, video and audio interviews, and still images into a single show that addresses a given topic.
Our eyes are on the future but for now this is a season when we help our sports OTT customers shine. It’s when sports puts our flexible, scalable platforms to the ultimate test – transforming stadium action into the unforgettable personalized and dynamic experiences that fans love.
We can’t wait to see how Generative AI makes all of that even better.
Paul Pastor