Ten Hot Takes From ESPN’s EDGE Innovation Conference

Discussions for tech execs range from generative AI to alternative broadcasts

ESPN last week held its fourth-annual ESPN Edge Innovation Conference in New York City, giving industry technology leaders an opportunity to hear from key ESPN executives and their top technology and innovation partners (Accenture, WSC Sports, Meta, Microsoft) on some of the hot topics moving ESPN, and the industry, forward. Here are some quick snapshots and insights from the panel discussions, which covered everything from the role of generative AI to immersive fan experiences via VR and COSM to how ESPN is creating more and more alternative broadcasts that give fans new reasons to be engaged.

Peter Murphy, SVP, content and media, COSM, on why coupling more immersive broadcasts with COSM’s immersive environment is a game-changer: “At the end of the day, both TV and COSM rely on the live product, and the live element of sport is driving what we’re doing. We can be innovative in a way that utilizes alternative broadcast in ways that ESPN and other are not using. The key to what we’re doing is, we’re bringing in the ESPN broadcast feed. The narrative storytelling that’s happening through ESPN’s team is coming to our venues, and we’re matching that with our own alternative production of the immersive feed. I think it has been a great partnership in terms of utilizing what broadcasters do so well and making sure that it is making our experience premium.”

Fans of the NFL and The Simpsons are in for a treat on Dec. 9, when ESPN will give the game between the Dallas Cowboys and Cincinnati Bengals the “FUNDAY Football” treatment.

Tina Thornton, EVP, creative studio and marketing, ESPN, on the NFL’s Simpsons “Funday Football” broadcast on Dec. 9 and why those sorts of broadcasts are important: “We have a committee that looks at all our alternate telecasts and says, ‘Hey, what should we be doing next?’ They came across combining the IP of The Simpsons with an NFL broadcast, and we’re just super excited about it. We’re partnering with Beyond Sports on that and also working with our production colleagues; there is a huge amount of people involved with it. But these efforts, like Toy Story and Big City Greens previously, have been wonderful for young audiences and co-viewing audiences because they reach a variety of generations.

Mike McQuade, EVP, sports production, ESPN, on what to expect from ESPN’s TGL broadcasts in early 2025: “Every year, alternative telecasts continue to get better, and, in January, the TGL will make its debut with a golf league and their simulator. The technology that they’re working on and their group are unbelievable, and I’m anxious to see what they do and how TGL makes us better as a group.”

Sander Schouten, co-founder/CEO, Beyond Sports, on how AI and data could create new ways of engaging fans: “Right now, everything is still linear, but how can we make it more interactive? For example, using an AI bot to run what-if scenarios for things like the quarterback throwing the ball to the left or right side. How would that play have played out? I think we’re at a stage right now where we understand data so well that we’re able to play out those moments. Those are the things that we’re excited about.”

Thornton on ESPN’s Fortnite launch: “We just launched the ESPN Football Island as part of Fortnite, and there are some mini games as part of that as well. In the last two weeks, they’ve had more than 20 million minutes played, and that to me is a success. It has also been amazing as there are different audiences that we can engage with in this space, which is really important. It has also been such a success that we are looking at potentially doing new islands and new IP. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in that space.McQuade on new experiences for fans: “I think customization of the experience for folks is important in the games that we’re producing. What other alternatives can we offer folks, whether it’s cameras, statistics, different commentary? I think we’re just scratching the surface on what that could be. The animated games are unbelievable, but some of the other things that could be done with all the technology we have are endless. I do think some of the things that we’re already working on beyond just the alternate announcers would be alternate camera angles.”

From left: ESPN’s Kevin Lopes in conversation with Lan Guan of Accenture, Andy Beach of Microsoft, Sarah Malkin of Meta, and Aviv Arnon of WSC Sports

Lan Guan, chief AI officer, Accenture, on the role generative AI will play in the industry: “Autonomous AI agents will create this dynamic workflow sitting on top of the AI models to create a wonderful experience and help employees collaborate with them within an enterprise. The second part is hyper-personalization: consumers are becoming much more demanding, and generative AI can accelerate that. Also look for artificial specialized intelligence, meaning that companies and brands can scale AI within the enterprise to create a specialized language model with all the knowledge that you have about your brand, your viewers, your fans. I am excited about that.

Sarah Malkin, director, metaverse entertainment, Meta, on the current and future state of VR: “What we’ve been able to do this last year with ESPN is start the partnership with original content and highlights that are brought into our Quest VR and mixed-reality headsets and metaverse products that bring you access to experiences and events in sports that you could not get in any other way. Things like being courtside or inside our sports hub, called Stadium, where you can also watch every NBA League Pass game. But community and connection are a big part of what we all love about the sports experience, and we’re soon launching a fully embodied 3D environment and sports playground called ESPN Tailgate, where you can embody an avatar and play games like Cornhole and Home Run Derby with other sports fans. My favorite part is, you can get behind the First Take broadcast anchor desk and get recorded giving your own point of view on the hottest and most controversial sports topics now. There will also be some Easter eggs for the real, diehard ESPN fans.”

Aviv Arnon, co-founder/CBDO, WSC Sports, on how the company is expanding beyond just game highlights and the role of generative AI: “We’ve taken the next step in the product to cover not only the game footage itself but everything around the game as well. We’re taking the interviews, the press conferences, the players coming on the court, the coach getting angry or whatever, and even the studio shows. This is a cool way to change automated content storytelling.

“As for generative AI, we started with AI commentary and generating a script that’s contextual to the video we’re creating in multiple languages, like French, Spanish, and Portuguese. But now we have started creating a text-to-video solution as well: you can create a video that fits the article. On ESPN, there are a lot of articles that don’t have relevant video, and we can generate video from text prompts for those articles.”

Andy Beach, CTO, media and entertainment, Microsoft, on generative AI and personalization: “Generative AI is impacting all the areas of media and entertainment at once. We’ve been trying to think about how we bring in more models, because you don’t want to change out workflows as part of that. You need a unified [approach] to bring AI to your creative workflows without having to think about it.

“One of the first problems we solved with AI was expediting closed captioning and tweaking it so it is more accurate. One of the first projects where we used a lot of data in a media application was to bring the names of the players into a reference model for the larger news model so it could better identify players. Moving on from there, we’re doing things like summarizations around the games or being able to create a lot of different descriptions of the games because there’s not one single description [that suits everyone]. There might be one, which is what an announcer would say, but then there’s how I might describe it to my daughter or how a celebrity might describe it.”