In sport streaming production, judgment becomes the competitive advantage
I came away from IBC this year with a slightly different feeling than usual. Normally, there are one or two technologies or trends that dominate the conversation. This year, what struck me wasn't any individual technology. It was the sheer amount that is now possible.
AI can create highlights, translate commentary, generate graphics, find stories in data, and personalise content. Production can happen remotely. Cameras can be almost anywhere. Workflows that once required racks of hardware can increasingly run in software. Content can be created, localised and distributed at a scale that would have been unimaginable not that long ago. It's extraordinary progress, but walking around the RAI, I found myself thinking about a slightly different problem: if we can now do almost anything, how do we decide what we should actually do?
For much of my career, innovation in sports broadcasting has been about removing constraints. Could we get a camera there? Could we send the pictures back? Could we produce the event remotely? Could we afford to cover a smaller sport? Could we create content quickly enough? Could we distribute it to the audience that wanted it? Technology has systematically knocked down those barriers. That's something worth celebrating, but it also changes the nature of the challenge. For years, capability was scarce. Increasingly, it isn't. Judgement is.
AI is probably the clearest example. We can now create hundreds of clips from a single match almost instantly. That's technically impressive, but creating 500 clips isn't necessarily the problem we need to solve. The real value comes from knowing which five actually matter, who they're relevant to and why anyone should care about them. The same applies across the sports experience. We can give viewers multiple camera angles, cover the screen in real-time data, create alternate commentaries, personalised feeds and endless variations of the same event. But should we? Sometimes the best editorial decision is still to point the camera at the action and let the moment breathe.
That's where I think the conversation around technology needs to evolve. For years we've understandably focused on what technology enables. The next stage is becoming much more discerning about where those capabilities genuinely improve the experience. Because more isn't automatically better. More cameras don't guarantee a better production. More data doesn't guarantee greater understanding. More content doesn't guarantee more engagement. More personalisation doesn't necessarily create a stronger connection. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it creates noise. Knowing the difference is judgement.
And that potentially makes experienced creative people more important, not less. There has been a lot of understandable discussion about what AI and automation mean for production roles. Some tasks will undoubtedly change. Some will disappear. Others will emerge. But I struggle with the idea that greater automation inevitably diminishes the importance of human creativity. I think it may do the opposite. If technology can increasingly generate unlimited options, somebody still needs to decide what's good.
A producer needs to recognise the moment that matters. A director needs to know when another camera angle adds something and when it distracts. An editor needs to understand which ten seconds tell the story better than the other 500 clips available. A journalist needs to recognise the statistic that explains what just happened rather than simply displaying everything the system can generate. Technology can create possibilities. Taste, experience and editorial instinct turn those possibilities into something people actually want.
The same principle applies beyond production. Executives now face an extraordinary range of choices. AI, cloud, automation, personalisation, new distribution models, new platforms and new ways of monetising audiences all compete for investment. The temptation is to do everything, but access to technology is becoming less of a differentiator. Many organisations increasingly have access to the same cloud platforms, AI models, production tools and data. The advantage comes from knowing where to use them and, perhaps more importantly, where not to.
That's a harder conversation because saying yes to innovation is easy. It sounds progressive. Saying no requires confidence. It requires being clear about the experience you're trying to create and disciplined enough to reject capabilities that don't improve it. Sport also has something else we need to protect: shared moments. We talk a lot about personalisation, and I'm a huge believer in its potential, but some moments are powerful precisely because millions of people experience them together. A last-minute goal doesn't necessarily need twenty overlays, an AI-generated explanation and a personalised camera selection. Sometimes it just needs the pictures. Technology should know how to enhance the moment. We need the judgement to know when to get out of its way.
That's probably my biggest takeaway from IBC this year. We've spent decades expanding what is possible, and we're entering an era where the range of possibilities is becoming almost limitless. That doesn't make human decision-making less important. It makes it more valuable.
When technology can generate almost infinite possibilities, possibility itself stops being the differentiator. Taste matters. Editorial instinct matters. Experience matters. Knowing when to automate and when not to matters. Technology can give us the options, but it can't absolve us of the responsibility to choose well.
And when everything is possible, judgement becomes the competitive advantage.
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