Fans of the Australian Open hoping to watch some of the tennis matches on the official livestream have been met with a strange surprise this week. Amusingly, the players have been replaced with CGI overlays resembling Mii characters, making the match look like a scene from Wii Sports. The new format has had an overwhelmingly positive reaction from social media users.
This unusual use of CGI has emerged because the Australian Open does not own all of its own broadcasting rights/copyright. Many of its rights were exclusively licenced to various global broadcasters for a lucrative price. The replacement of the players with animated characters is an attempt to avoid rightsholders bringing action against it for breach of contract or copyright infringement while being able to maintain coverage of the tournament.
Matches are being streamed live on the official Australian Open YouTube account, with various details such as the ball, the racquets and of course the players being animated. This technology is not novel though, as it was also used during the 2024 Open and has been utilised across various other sports, such as American football and ice hockey. Director of innovation at the Australian Open, Machar Reid, explained “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,” and went on to say “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.”
It will be interesting to observe whether this technology is rolled out further across more sports. Reid hopes that more broadcasters will utilise this format alongside traditional live action.
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