Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to bypass broadcast restrictions
39 comments
·January 16, 2025edgarvaldes
BurningFrog
Yeah, they were good enough that it took a while for me to realize why they seemed off. Creepy stuff.
JimDabell
This reminds me of the voice ban Thatcher enacted in the UK back in the late 80s relating to the Troubles.
It was illegal to broadcast the voices of representatives of specific political groups (apart from during elections). Mainly Gerry Adams, who was leader of Sinn Féin, a party strongly linked to the IRA and terrorism.
The law was overly specific, so broadcasters, including the BBC, just dubbed his voice with a soundalike.
defrost
Spitting Image had a lot of fun during those days with puppets and voice actors.
Puppet Gerry Adams made a comeback on radio years later: https://youtu.be/vutbvLbRiMk?t=64
nyjah
In case anyone is wondering how to pay for and watch tennis in US: there is a tennis tv app. That app allows you to watch the men’s tour. There’s another app, the tennis channel app, that is for the women’s tour and maybe some other random tourneys. Neither of those apps have the grand slams tho, ie the Australian open. For that , in the US you need espn plus and can’t get away from ads. And then there’s also the French open. And between nbc, peacock and whatever else, beyond pirating the matches, I’ve genuinely been stumped trying to pay for it legitimately.
I saw this the other day on YouTube and it made me turn on the real thing.
mbajkowski
This is 100 percent the truth. Watching tennis in the US has become increasingly frustrating. I almost long for the old days where one could count on one of two channels to always have coverage. I wish Amazon, Netflix, YouTube or similar would step up and secure all the rights from college to Grand Slam tennis.
userbinator
I wonder if the relative acceptance of this has anything to do with the popularity of "vtubers".
boomboomsubban
I like watching random sports on YouTube so saw this yesterday. I could only manage a minute, it was just bizarre. It did make me wonder how I could watch the Australia Open, but I wasn't willing to subscribe to ESPN to see it.
Not bad advertising really.
Eridrus
ESPN+ is $12 for a month via Hulu. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Finding this info is ridiculous though.
DidYaWipe
Love it. I'm surprised they're allowed to use the audio, though. In the USA, the licensing notices specifically prohibit use of even "the descriptions" that appear in a broadcast.
I suppose they'll close that loophole in other countries.
The whole regime is a big F-U to fans, and to the taxpayers who subsidize these teams out the wazoo.
randall
you can’t copyright facts. descriptions of the broadcast might be copyrighted, but stating facts of the individual events can’t actually be copyrighted, regardless of what the nfl and olympics say in their disclaimer.
pedalpete
Doesn't this harm the long-term value of AOs rights sales to the broadcasters?
If I know AO is going to broadcast on youtube, why am I as a European broadcaster going to pay them the same amount as I did when they weren't trying to work against me?
tsujamin
I don’t think long-term value is their guiding star, if their previous NFT forays are anything to go by
yardstick
Yeah it very much feels like a case of biting the hand that feeds. What’s the long term goal of AO by doing this?
tomhoward
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 most homes (and thus Airbnbs) don’t 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 sport 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).
null
zmgsabst
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.
voidfunc
Let's do this for baseball.. would probably make everything way more interesting
mopenstein
At one point data for every MLB game was available from MLB.com. I started writing a RBI baseball simulator using said data and the graphics from the NES game. But then I realized I'm not that good at programming but I still think it would've been neat to watch game 3 of the 1970 world series as played out by 1985 video game graphics.
airstrike
this 100% sounds like a project I'd see at the top of the front page on a Saturday
jitl
You can ask Claude / Cursor to do most of it these days
oplav
MLB does something similar called Gameday 3D. https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-gameday-3d-guide
The main difference is that it's rendered client side so you can control the camera for yourself. You can watch in real time during the season, the latency is around 30 seconds behind live action.
whartung
MLB StarCast generates ~7TB of data per game. I assume the bulk of that is video from the high speed cameras.
grajaganDev
"the Australian Open’s own channel has streamed select matches using cartoonish avatars of players instead of the actual broadcast."
LOL - but why not? They need to do this for every sport.
nxobject
Instead of filling NFL game broadcasts with absurd amounts of graphics overlaid on camera footage, we could go the opposite direction and show minimalist renderings of live NFL games. Revolutionary.
scripturial
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.
Philpax
Apple are recording footage - there are immersive videos on the AVP for MLS and a few other things, and they're tremendous, but nobody is streaming them yet. It's a lot of data, which I assume hasn't been cracked yet.
In addition, the real end-goal would be complete 3D reconstruction that lets you view the stadium from any angle, but I imagine that's a few years away still - lots of technical problems to solve to create a scene and stream it in real-time.
YokoZar
Somewhat halfway would be a slightly delayed version of the game using much better-in-hindsight decisions about which camera angles to show during a play.
teractiveodular
Then plug in another AI that maps the cartoons back to deepfakes of the original players, and the circle of life is complete.
defrost
There's a startup here for someone . . .
Could even work for CSPAN, QuestionTime, and other political coverage ..
inglor_cz
Presidential debates... perhaps the viewers could even choose their favorite skin etc.
lostlogin
Get the favoured candidate to say what the viewer wants, and have the other person say the opposite. Then the system would then be perfect.
bdangubic
it is always two clowns debating so this would TOTALLY work :)
Fuzzwah
Monetize through hats and outfits...
nxobject
If you missed the best at the bottom, it turns out that Tennis Australia does VC investing too now:
> Tennis Australia has funded several startups through its venture capital fund as it looks to push into the technology space, including a failed flirtation with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that concluded last year.
> The fund, AO Ventures, is worth US$30 million (A$41.8 million) and includes support from Tesla chair Robyn Denholm’s Wollemi Capital Group (which also has investments in the NBL and the Sydney Kings), as well as Art Gallery of NSW chair Mark Nelson and Packer confidante Ashok Jacob.
zfg
Nothing like a bit of synthetic tennis:
courseofaction
Is there a level of fidelity at which the animated character becomes an issue? Are we going to be seeing unreal engine powered photorealistic characters before this loophole is closed?
Does the rights holder have to specify that the motion data is not acceptable for rebroadcast?
On the surface this seems like a cheap abuse of loopholes and any broadcast partner would be looking at them askance and consulting contacts and lawyers...
numpad0
Animation bone format probably needs a redesign. Human anatomy is universally represented as a simple chain of sticks with ball joints at the end, which is good enough for many purposes but not ideal for closeup shots of muscular figures.
Last FIFA World Cup I was looking for recaps on Youtube after the day's matches. A lot of results were unofficial videogame recreations (think XBox EA Sports FC) of the real match final score. It was very weird.