Looking to the future and how to get viewers even more engaged with sports broadcasting, the executive vice president and CTO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media in the US Joe Inzerillo was adamant artificial intelligence would play a key role:
“It is nascent but the way AI is developing is mind blowing and so is what we will see in five to ten years from now,” he enthused during a panel conference named ‘Sport: The Future Ain’t What it Used to be…’ on Thursday.
The company, in which Walt Disney has just bought a one-third stake, has already been developing technology that uses radar location to track players on the field. “The data enables us to track player velocity and crunch statistics in real time and that creates more insight into the game and educates the fan,” he described.
But more than that, the technology enables the viewer to react in what Inzerillo calls “Spiderman time”, meaning predicting things before they even happen.
Other future trends include conversational video. “That is something we are looking into, that’s my exciting focus in the coming years”, outlined Emily Forbes, the founder and CEO of Seenit in the UK, a company which aggregates behind the scenes content created by selected fans.
