Stepping into the future: how AI and AR are influencing American sports

Nov 24, 2023

The Emerging Sportech Opportunity

 

As the sun sets over the horizon, the dawn of innovation rises in American sports. With generative artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR), the landscape is witnessing a tech-driven revolution. The NBA, NFL and NASCAR’s unholy trinity spearheads this transformation, creating compelling, dynamic, and game-changing experiences.

The NBA’s partnership with WSC Sports exemplifies what intelligent automation and strategic content creation can do. The league produces individualized highlight packages for each player by integrating generative AI, increasing fan engagement. Far from making layoffs, this move has caused the user base to swell by 40%.

Across the arena, the NFL champions a culture of innovation through its Future of Football Committee. They facilitate the adoption of technologies to enhance the game, ensuring safety, increasing competitiveness, and improving the pace of play. In a nod to fan engagement, they go behind the scenes with the Innovative Ideas blog and even allow crowdsourced creativity.

The NFL has championed a technological innovation and evolution culture to deliver a compelling and dynamic sport. Embracing a collaborative environment, the NFL encourages integrating creative technical solutions through its ‘Future of Football Committee’. This committee is tasked with identifying and exploring innovative ways technology can enhance the game.

 

NFL and Amazon Prime Video are implementing the use of Augmented Reality in its official broadcasts.

 

However, NASCAR’s recent strides bring interactive fan engagement into a new dimension. Their Xfinity Series unveiled a fan-controlled car, resulting from collaboration with Fan Controlled Sports & Entertainment. Fans can now make critical decisions, like selecting the driver and the paint scheme, to determine live race strategies. This innovative step attributes the power of car operation to fans’ palms via the Control App, altering the traditional dynamics of the sport.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a notable example of this innovative surge. For the 2023 season, the league incorporated generative AI in its overarching marketing strategy to streamline content creation. Teaming up with WSC Sports, the NBA uses AI to analyze every play during the games, automatically generating individualized highlight packages for each player in every match.

The NBA’s leveraging of AI unlocks possibilities for other sports organizations. Each league has unique needs and audiences, but AI’s depth of data analysis and customization is universally valuable.

This advanced AI technology fuels the generation of digestible “social-style” content engineered to engage fans and direct more users to the NBA’s app. This calculated move allows the league to mass-produce tailored content without exhausting the workforce. After all, with potentially hundreds of distinct player statistics occurring across matches each night, manually crafting individual highlight reels is an unfeasible task.

 

These sports advocates have realized that the new era of technology can make sports more interactive and attractive, thereby enhancing user experience. The advances in AI, AR and app-controlled systems epitomize how American sports leagues are steering the industry into the future. As a result, fans become active participants rather than passive viewers.

In closing, integrating generative AI, AR, and interactive fan control signifies an exciting shift in American sports. As technology evolves, so will the fan experience and the game, promising a more immersive, personalized and thrilling evolution of ‘sportainment’.

Stay tuned!

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