Op-Ed: From Highlights to Margins, AI Is Transforming Sports Streaming

Besides helping personalize the fan experience, AI promises new revenue for streamers

Artificial intelligence is radically changing the way fans experience streamed sports, elevating passive viewing into an interactive and personalized journey. From real-time translation of sports commentary to generating match highlights, AI-powered advanced streaming technologies are making sports content more accessible and engaging for global audiences. These advances are not only fueling fan experiences but also unlocking new monetization opportunities for sports streamers through targeted advertising.

As AI-driven streaming technology continues to evolve, it will play a crucial role in shaping the future of sports streaming by driving deeper engagement, increased viewer retention, and incremental revenue for sports streamers.

Breaking Language Barriers

Harmonic’s Jean Macher: “As AI evolves, it will [make] sports streaming more immersive and profitable for service providers.”

With AI-aided translation, sports events become accessible to international fans who may not have engaged earlier because of language barriers. For example, baseball is highly popular in Japan, but most games are played in the U.S. with English commentary. AI translation enables real-time conversion of English commentary into Japanese, allowing fans in Japan to enjoy the game in their native language while preserving the excitement and tone of the original content.

Another use case for AI audio translation is overlay translation, or “overdubbing”: the original language is played at a low volume while the translated audio is layered on top at a higher volume. This approach is preferred when viewers want to hear both the original commentary and the translation simultaneously. It can help with comprehension while preserving the authenticity of the original broadcast. AI-powered overlay translations provide a natural and immersive viewing experience for global audiences.

Beyond improving fan engagement, AI translation reduces the need for human translators, making multilingual broadcasting more affordable for service providers. AI models continue to improve at translating various sports idioms and lingo. For NBA fans, expressions like the paint, the charity stripe, air ball, money time, and garbage time are now being translated with a higher degree of accuracy.

Keeping Fans in the Action

Another AI innovation enhancing sports fans’ streaming experiences is automated highlights. Automatic sports-highlights detection enhances both live and post-game viewing experiences by instantly identifying and extracting key moments from a match. AI enables service providers to detect crucial moments, such as a goal in soccer, and automatically curate clips for fans. For example, instead of watching the entire match, fans can view a highlight clip starting 15 seconds before the goal. This allows late joiners to catch up on key moments before jumping into the live action.

AI personalizes sports streaming with automatic translation and highlight detection.

Service providers can also use AI for postgame summaries. AI-generated highlight reels cater to audiences who prefer condensed game recaps over full matches. AI automates a process traditionally carried out manually, reducing costs and enabling faster content creation for broadcasters and streaming platforms.

Ultimately, AI enables service providers to maximize engagement, improve content accessibility, and streamline highlight production.

Enhanced Sports-Streaming Monetization

AI is revolutionizing monetization for live sports streaming by enabling precise and automated ad insertion.

Traditionally, inserting targeted ads requires knowing the exact timing of ad breaks, which is provided by SCTE-certified markers in linear channels. However, not all channels carry the markers, making monetization difficult.

AI analyzes video streams to detect ad-break boundaries and generates SCTE-35 markers in live content. This allows video-streaming platforms to insert targeted ads seamlessly, even for channels without predefined break markers.

Additionally, AI enhances in-stream ad placement by identifying moments in the live action where ads can be inserted without disrupting the viewing experience. By automating this process, AI reduces costs and increases monetization opportunities for sports broadcasters.

The Road Ahead: AI’s Future in Sports Streaming

AI’s role in live sports streaming is evolving rapidly. We’ve seen examples of how AI can automatically generate match timelines with highlights and power interactive chat interfaces that allow fans to ask questions about the game. Currently, highlight timelines are manually curated by humans watching the game. In the future, AI will scale this process across more games and sports, making real-time highlights accessible for a much broader audience.

AI is transforming sports streaming by automating such tasks as audio translation, highlights, and insertion of SCTE-35 markers, enhancing fan engagement and increasing monetization opportunities. AI greatly reduces reliance on manual content curation while making live coverage more engaging and accessible. As AI evolves, it will further personalize the viewing experience, making sports streaming more immersive and profitable for service providers.