Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to bypass broadcast restrictions

I believe this[1] 99% Invisible podcast episode talks about foley during sporting events.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-sound-of-sports/

That reminds me of the anecdote of UK radio coverage of a cricket match in Australia in the early 1900's, the broadcasters were reading a transcript (telegraphed?) and hitting the table with pencil to simulate the bat hitting the ball.

What about the grunting? Gonna need a consult with Pornhub on training that one.

Ultimately though, with the help of AI and some volunteers in the demoscene, we should be able to compress tennis audio down to a few kilobytes per hour.

This doesn't have anything to do with copyright. This is about contract restrictions, which would usually forbid reusing the same audio in a case like this.

> but stating facts of the individual events can’t actually be copyrighted, regardless of what the nfl and olympics say in their disclaimer.

That's interesting. Does that mean someone could go to an NFL game and broadcast the play by play of the game? Stating facts like: "It's 4th and goal, mahomes drops back and passed to kelce for a touchdown". You could legally broadcast that?

I wish there were a law to the effect of "if a copyright holder lies that doing something with their copyrighted work is prohibited, when it's actually allowed, then the work in question immediately and permanently enters the public domain".

I don't think anyone said anything about copyrighting facts.

Of your primary interests in life where would you rank ESPN+? Now multiply that by $12 to get an overall impact since presumably you would be willing to pay at least as much for things you value more highly.

This is why "just" $x per month is, in general, not a sustainable model for most things for most people and why 'piracy' is booming again.

I have a low tolerance for paying to watch advertisements.

The way most sports works you can’t just get espn+. They might not license all the games so you are beholden to multiple services to get them. Playoffs are also a mess. Services know viewerships are up and rights are traded for specific games like cattle. It is the most anti consumer thing I’ve seen trying to follow college football. Easier to just watch it at a bar that pays into all of this.

None of the good matches are on ESPN+ though

It’s weird how invisible tennis is on television in Europe.

I was traveling in Spain and Italy last year when Roland Garros was on, which included major highlights like Nadal’s (likely) last ever match there and strong performances from European players like Alcaraz, Sinner, Tsitsipas and Zverev (indeed almost all of the current top ten men are European).

But it was only on the pay channel EuroSport, which many homes (and thus Airbnbs) don’t seem to have, and was only available for us in one upmarket hotel in Spain we stayed in for an indulgence for one night.

So the tournament promoters may be making the calculation that if the current TV rights holders aren’t ultimately getting many eyeballs watching their events, they need to do other things to build/maintain the profile of the sport with a view to one day offering it only via the internet (particularly if broadcast TV continues to decline and the networks can no longer afford large rights deals).

Survival amid viewer shifts away from traditional broadcasts.

The people who they sell the rights to are less valuable partners, so AO feels comfortable making them a less valuable offer while pursuing other audiences.

Surely nothing bad can come out of laws impeding the expression of opinions

I wish there was a browser extension where you you ad-block people’s voices while still hearing the news.

When shit like that works well by default with very little effort or downside? That’s some AI I can get excited about.

This tennis thing is so cool, I hope we see more shit like this where AI comes down on the side of the little guy.

if (voter == 'left')

then insert(billionaire[0])

else if (voter == 'right')

then insert(billionaire[1])

else insert(billionaire[2])

let billionaire = ['Elon Musk', 'Bill Gates', 'Mark Zuckerberg']

I assume eventually there will be an upsell product that allows you to watch with a 3D/VR courtside view. I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t exist already. I think Apple would sell a few more headsets if they made this happen.

Presidential debates... perhaps the viewers could even choose their favorite skin etc.

this 100% sounds like a project I'd see at the top of the front page on a Saturday

You can ask Claude / Cursor to do most of it these days

The thing is that major live sport is now the only category that is successful in the broadcast TV market. Without that, many (most?) broadcast networks may as well shut down. We saw the best evidence of that recently in Australia when the Foxtel pay TV company was sold to European sports streaming service DAZN.

Foxtel has dozens of channels including the “agenda-setting” Sky News but in the end only its major sports rights deals (which it’s been bidding up and losing money on for years) held any value.

One day we’ll all accept that broadcast TV is dead and everyone can just have a personalized content feed streamed to them, but for as long as broadcast TV license holders keep up the fight, it’s going to be a frustrating endeavor trying to see the sports we want, wherever we are.

> The whole point about Netflix was that it proved that customers know what they want if you make it available.

yes, but the media rights owners want the maximum money from their viewers, where as netflix model leaves money on the table.

It's why i almost always resort to piracy, now that netflix has lost a lot of their licenses for stuff as media rights owners start their own walled gardens.

Nothing drives me more nuts than them showing commercials during the changeover, coming back at 30-0 and then showing the replay of the drama from what went down during the changeover.

When I watch a match commercial free, with changeovers, I find myself much more engaged. Changeovers can tell you a lot about the match and player and espn just ignores it and then has the audacity to replay any drama during the real points. It’s a travesty.