IBC comes around every year as a unique opportunity to speak to customers, partners, and innovators in the broadcast industry, packed in a four-day rollercoaster. As I landed in Amsterdam, I knew my conversations would be focused not just on broadcast, but on sports production and analysis.

This year, there was no shortage of brilliant sports coverage — from massive studios recreated for the EUROs then almost immediately for the Olympics, to the engagement in additional feeds and investment in digital channels. We saw creativity flourish with incredible technology bringing a vision to life.

But in a year of big adaptations to cover global sporting events comes also the need to make smart investments to carefully spend and increase production efficiencies. How are sports broadcasters doing that?

Here are some key takeaways from my conversations at IBC.

I don’t need to tell you AI has been at the tip of everyone’s tongue, and it was a big topic for IBC this year. However, the way AI can make a difference in sports productions is not a one-size-fits-all solution — as with most situations, it depends on the goals and size of the particular production.

This year, I found most conversations on AI centered around its implementation in media asset management systems. Having a modern MAM system is crucial for every broadcaster. The content archived grows every day, and it’s essential to extract value from that archive.

By augmenting or substituting sports feeds and manual metadata entry with AI derived scene data, any specific moment can be found — whether that is a goal, red card, penalty, or another point of interest. It enables the production to focus on creating content from the archive, and minimizing search times.

Now, sports productions are looking for ways AI could simplify and speed up the editing process. Perhaps by making AI-generated sequences utilizing the archived content, or upscaling and error correcting older material to today’s standards. Even something as simple as transcription and summarization, but included in the MAM system, without having to rely on an external software. AI tools have incredible potential to help drive production efficiencies, but we still must consider it’s not accurate 100% of the time — and teams will have to consider this when choosing how to introduce it into their workflows.

I see automation as a natural progression to sports broadcast, which is why it dominated so many conversations on the show floor. We can see the need for production environments to be automated, which, through Viz Mosart, we offer as a “production assistant”. This means that certain repetitive tasks that were managed by actual people on seats can be automated, improving the workflow, and allowing those people to enhance the production by engaging in more creative and challenging tasks.

This brings many benefits, and a principal one is energy consumption reduction. The extent of the reduction will of course depend on the size and type of production, but the ability to do more with less is a positive step: there is less input, and less energy consumption, with a better output. The sustainability question is a growing concern, and I can see it becoming more of a focus in the future.

From a sports perspective — agreed by entities I spoke to — automating workflows relieves specific efforts, saving on cost, increasing the quality of production, and making space and time for more innovation. Resources are better allocated elsewhere, to create more content, better.

The visualization of data is the bread and butter of sports production. We’ve seen it displayed in AR graphics and through telestration seamlessly — illustrated in a virtualized environment such as BBC Sport’s studio for the Olympics, or gamifying post-game analysis like UEFA did for the Euro final between England and Spain.

So, what’s next?

Telestration will change, taking further steps in bringing points of view we could only imagine before. Where now we can visualize different angles in a field, as well as players’ moves and tactics, we’ll soon be able to create a complete 3D world with avatars, displaying what a player sees in a key moment of the game. All driven by data and visualized by graphics.

People are at the heart of sports. Having technology literally putting the audience in the player’s shoes has the potential to transform how we consider their decisions and how we come to understand the sports we love.

Now that cloud productions have been here for a while, we’re witnessing how diversely they can be implemented, and just how far they can be taken.

Cloud fits into the needs of several types of productions. For big broadcasters and leagues, having a centralized facility allows better allocation of time to create additional feeds to output supported by cloud. Centralized facilities naturally have more technology to offer than an OB, so, depending on the connectivity, additional feeds can be produced in the cloud to engage fans with insights and content — expanding the offering for audiences and answering the needs of those who want to personalize their viewing experience.

For smaller production teams and niche sports, it allows better quality productions to happen with less cost, also improving the audience’s viewing experience.

The versatility of cloud adoption, combined with the evolving needs of sports coverage, guarantees some interesting workflow changes in the future. We’ve seen sports customers shift their entire production to the cloud, for instance, the European League of Football, who since the shift have committed to another three seasons of cloud live production with Vizrt, novel.media, and AWS. Other customers have opted for a hybrid cloud model, which still reduces the amount of personnel and OB trucks on site, and consequently, cost — a key factor smart investments aim to reduce.

AI and automation, revolutionary visualization of data, and versatile cloud productions are some of the directions the industry is going to. The ongoing question is about how these directions enable productions to be more efficient, or to do more with less, and this is what takes precedence when it comes to investment.

Productions will also need to consider viewing preferences. Whether you are a global or minor league, you want the ability to reach as many fans as possible, ideally in their native language, on their device of choice, and with the viewer experience they prefer. Making productions more efficient also means delivering in more than one output, and therefore catering to these viewing preferences, with all the extra optional feeds.

It will be interesting to see the implementation of new technologies and ideas first discussed at the IBC show floor. Considering where to invest will take the efficacy of the results into account, so that, with a more efficient and creatively free production, broadcasters can deliver stunning coverage for all sporting events of any size.