The proposition is compelling: near-live, commentated coverage of the Australian Open, free to anyone across the world via YouTube, enhanced via a stream of comments from a like-minded online community.
Put like that, it’s no surprise a project called AO Animated has taken off at this year’s grand slam tournament at Melbourne Park. The catch? The players, ball and court are all computer-generated.
That hasn’t dissuaded hundreds of thousands of viewers from tuning into this vision of the Australian Open, featuring video game-like avatars but using real-world data in an emerging category of sports broadcasting helping tennis reach new fans.
The loophole allows the Australian Open to show a version of live events at the tournament on its own channels, despite having sold lucrative exclusive broadcast rights to partners across the globe.
The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men’s final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024.
The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. “Limb tracking is complex, you’ve got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton,” he said. “It’s not as seamless as it could be – we don’t have fingers – but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes.”
The data from sensors on the court is ingested and fed into a system that can produce the graphic reproduction with a two-minute delay. The same commentary and arena noises that would otherwise be heard on the television – as well as interstitial vision direct from the broadcast – are synced with the virtual representation of the match.
“It’s that community that engages with animated or virtual or gaming products, that’s our intuition, right?” Reid said of the target market. “There’s an immediate kind of blending of those two worlds and that’s instinctively where we’re positioning it for the moment.”
Similar projects have been undertaken in other sports, including an NFL broadcast with an animated Simpsons theme in December, and a special in American ice hockey. Reid said the motivations are around attracting a new category of fans to sport, supported by a technology-engaged online community.
He hopes broadcasters will one day adopt the technology alongside the live action. The project has been stewarded by Reid and driven by the engineer Mark Riedy, who has worked on video game crossovers in his time at Tennis Australia.
It is part of a growing push into the technology space by the sport’s peak body in Australia, which includes partnership and in some cases investment into media and health startups.
“We always try and innovate the fan experience, be that on site or at home,” Reid said. “Here’s a way through the world of broadcast that we can try and personalise the content in different ways, and present a different offering that ultimately we’d love to see the broadcasters pick up in time.”
Tennis Australia’s technological experimentation has included pursuing non-fungible tokens or NFTs, before it pulled out of the space this year.
It has also established a A$30m (£15.2m) venture capital fund called AO Ventures that has drawn investment from the Wollemi Capital Group of the Tesla chair, Robyn Denholm, and the Gnanalingam family who own the UK football club Queens Park Rangers. Its first investments are expected to be announced in coming months.
