SVG Sit-Down: Diversified’s Jared Timmins on AI for Broadcast Sports and Creating the ‘Smart Venue’

A look over the horizon at what the transition will look like

Sports and artificial intelligence are in a fraught pas de deux at the moment, each both needful and wary of the other. Meanwhile, broadcast sports is in multilayered flux, with massive payouts for rights even as the media landscape consolidates and looks for cost-cutting solutions. AI seems to offer some remedies but at an as-yet unknown cost.

At the same time, the value of sports globally has never been higher  — revenues at $2.65 trillion make it the ninth-largest industry on the planet — while AI’s still-nebulous worth is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions. Thus, any way that sports and AI intersect is inevitably impactful to both.

AV systems integrator Diversified has put technology systems into stadiums, arenas, and broadcast facilities for many of sports’ top brands — among them Comcast/NBC and Monumental Sports & Entertainment — and venues —the MLB Giants’ Oracle Park, Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden. SVG asked Diversified SVP, Innovation, Jared Timmins to parse this imminent intersection, to see what it can mean to broadcast sports and the people who work in its engine rooms.

Diversified’s Jared Timmins: “I think one of the greatest opportunities that we have with the aging population [of broadcast technicians] is to having those people embrace AI to teach AI how they think about the decisions that they make.”

You’ve said, “We’re getting close to the point where a director will just talk to an AI, which will run the entire show. Instead of a technical crew switching cameras or managing graphics, the AI will listen, watch the feed, and make changes automatically, enabling high-level production at a fraction of the cost.” What are the implications of that for those who work in the technical side of the broadcast-sports sector?
I tend to look at AI more as a people amplifier than as a replacement for people. I think there are certain jobs that will shift and change, but, as you look through any change, all the way back to the spinning jenny, it didn’t necessarily remove jobs; it opened up the opportunity for those jobs to evolve, maybe to become more creative.

I do think you will see reductions — we see reductions now — and I think it’d be Pollyannaish to act like AI wasn’t going to impact the marketplace. But, for those specialized roles that are doing creative things, the object of the clientele I’m talking about is not replacement of people but being able to have those people do more with less.

I think the trend we see across all of sports is that it’s really the emerging experiences outside of the main game, the personalization that we can bring outside of the main feed that starts to open up individualized options, experiences that bring new kinds of viewers into physical stadiums or into broadcast engagement that looks much more like a social experience than necessarily a broadcast event.

To do that, we need to be able to produce a lot of different variants with the same staff or less staff than we have today. I don’t necessarily believe that all staff is going to be replaced by AI, but I definitely think that, when it comes to creating stories and things like that, the focus changes to being much more creative and much more personalized than we see today.

People on the technical end of broadcast sports may have to get creative now and then as part of, say, a workaround for a signal-path problem. More broadly, can AI replace that kind of capability?
I’m not sure if replacement’s the right terminology. I think the workflows are going to get more complicated because they’re going to get broader and are going to be more focused on different consumer types. You’re still going to need technical people to manage those systems, to operate those systems, but the way they’re operating them and what they’re doing is going to be drastically, I think, different. Instead of thinking is AI going to replace my job, [ask] how would you do your job differently if you had an unlimited resource of AI to accomplish your outcomes?

How do you train people for that kind of future, particularly those who’ve been doing it conventionally for decades?
It may sound kind of reductive, but AI is the best teacher on how to embrace AI. I say, particularly to young people out of school and people wanting to get into technical opportunities, you should be using AI every moment of every day to help with any of the questions that you have.

I think one of the greatest opportunities that we have with the aging population [of broadcast technicians] is that there’s a real sense of, how do I add legacy to the end of my career? Instead of thinking that AI is going to replace these people, what we’ve been doing is having those people embrace AI to teach AI how they think about the decisions that they make. Their legacy can be digitized in a way that we can train a next generation in a one-to-one scenario with AI agents in a way that we never could from the traditional mentoring environment, because people don’t have enough time and, often, we don’t have enough budget to accomplish that.

I’m bullish on the fact that the jobs are going to change, and I do think that what it means to be an engineer is going to be way more of an orchestration of technology through the assistance of AI. And I think the current engineering staff has much wisdom to add to that. I think AI plays a part in helping instruct the next generation. When I have someone out of college or producing high school games locally, my push to them is become AI-first yourself and let AI help you maximize all the opportunities that you have. For those people at the end of their career, let AI be a source of digital legacy that can help keep their voice and their wisdom relevant to the next generation.

Regardless of how the transition comes about, how are people going to interface within the broadcast facility and within the broadcast venue?
What we’re seeing in the way we’re building facilities, infrastructures, and platforms now is that AI is coming in at the system level. You can see that in how Microsoft is embedding AI capabilities directly into the operating system; browsers are being created now [that enable] anything, such as cloud work from a browser, to be assisted by an AI at that systematic level. I think that’s the progression that we’re going to take from an AI standpoint. The interface [will be] an agentic-first interface.

What’s the transition going to be like?
I think the first thing is a digital transformation in a lot of our workflows as we look at how the technology has advanced, even in moving into what we thought would be cloud Renaissance, which I don’t think has been realized yet. It was disrupted largely because the platforms that vendors have created technology on haven’t changed with the pace of technology.

One of the biggest challenges we had in deploying cloud and deploying cloud solutions is that there’s no standard. I think things like MXL will help with that, but everyone creates their technology in a different way, so you don’t get the benefit of scale that you can take advantage of with virtual shared-memory environments that are available today. The same thing is true for organizations around AI.

I’m not sure I have the exact reason things tend to move slower in the broadcast space, but I’ve seen it almost at every transition that I’ve lived through: the business is a lagging indicator to the technology change. What we’re seeing now is, I think, two years later than in [other] major markets. Vendors are starting to come out with AI solutions, but, if you haven’t taken the time to upgrade the infrastructure and platforms of your technology and software, being able to just bolt on AI is a tiny value, as opposed to creating an AI-first platform, just like we needed to create Kubernetes-first platforms when we moved to the cloud.

How does that tie back into how the fan in the stands benefits?
The modern venue is more of a smart city than a stadium. The event is not the experience anymore; it’s part of a larger, connected digital environment. Sports need unique, immersive experiences to get younger demographics back in the bleachers.

You talk about the sports venue as a “smart city,” a stadium or arena tconnected beyond its walls, to other locations, such as hospitality — a hotel on the same campus or a VIP suite — and to personal devices. Is that happening already?
I don’t know of a venue that we’re working on right now that we’re not approaching through that lens. I think everything we’ve done, for example, with Monumental Sports and all their offerings and the directions that they’ve moved in have been a great template of what that looks like. There’s a lot of stuff I wish I could talk about, but every sports facility that I know of right now that we’re designing has an element of that smart-city environment built into it or is being plumbed so that it can expand out in that way.