At CES, Everyone Loves AI, Sports Fans Have More Grief Ahead

1. At CES, Everyone Loves AI

Unsurprisingly, “AI” was the darling of CES this year with pretty much every company at the show claiming to have some sort of “AI-powered” something.

As you may suspect, much of the “AI” is not particularly new—AI itself is not new, it’s the large language models (LLMs) and generative learning that are.

Still, there are some significant ways that AI is actually impacting the television industry for the better. 

Why It Matters

Metadata: AI-powered solutions can do things like scrape the web (Wikipedia, social media et al.) to identify a wider range of keywords around TV content, making it easier to do everything from recommendations to ad placement.

This is important because TV metadata sucks. Like seriously sucks. Back when everything was being digitized, they did not bother to introduce any kind of organized taxonomy for it, and what was put out was pretty light on the descriptors. These new Gen AI tools remedy that and can help improve discovery and recommendations. It can help with ad placement too, by ascertaining brand suitability or relevant context.

Ad Creation: Self-serve advertising is going to be huge this year (lots of people are talking about it, but it’s not gotten much press outside TVREV).  But it will only catch on if it is easy for, say, someone who owns a local beer garden to go online and make their own TV commercial. (That is why Facebook ads succeeded—they made it easy for small businesses to create ads without the cost of engaging a creative agency, something they could not afford.)

While the AI-created ads are not going to win a One Show pencil any time soon, they are more than good enough, and should help to democratize the industry. (And speaking of democracy, they should prove instrumental in bringing down ballot political dollars to CTV this year too.)

Measurement: There are multiple ways that LLM-based generative AI can help improve measurement. Its ability to instantly crunch huge sets of numbers gives it the ability to create more nuanced and personalized reporting, to identify and provide insights on viewing trends, to suggest ways to optimize creative and ad placement based on those insights, and do predictive modeling. 

Many of those functions already exist, the new AI technology will just make them faster and more accurate. 

What You Need To Do About It

If you are looking at these new solutions, just remember that not everything that is billed as “generative AI” is actually generative AI. And that even if it is, that’s not a Good Housekeeping seal of approval—there are generative AI solutions that do what they claim to do and plenty that do not. 

So caveat emptor.

That does not mean you should sleep on them, however. There is some pretty game changing stuff out there and you’d be foolish not to be investigating it and what it can do for you

And we’re only getting started.

2. Sports Fans Have More Grief Ahead

Netflix just released a new season of Break Point, which is good news for fans of reality-based tennis, but baseball, basketball and hockey fans got some bad news this week.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred allegedly ejected a deal that would allow Amazon to bail out the troubled Diamond Sports RSN project, meaning that baseball on streaming is largely going to be a pipe dream. Basketball and hockey too, since the Diamond RSNs appear to be going under.

Why It Matters

The bad news might not last forever. Manfred allegedly wants Amazon to negotiate digital rights directly with the league, thus eliminating the middleman.

And the New York Post is reporting that the Amazon deal might not be fully dead either, as the bankruptcy judge just granted Diamond an extension (“extra innings” in Post parlance) to work on a variation of the deal.

So there’s that, but it mostly points out a bigger issue, which is that sports fans, who once gladly bought high priced cable subscriptions in order to be able to watch all their games from a single source, now have to kludge together a solution from cable, broadcast and various streaming services. 

Or, to put it more bluntly, they are going to have to use Google rather than a program guide to find their game. (And even then, said game may be on multiple outlets, both streaming and linear.) 

As sports leagues shift more rights to streaming, this is only going to become a bigger issue too.

Fans are already getting pissed off about how many services they need to subscribe to and expanding that number will only piss them off more. The danger for pro sports is that the general consensus will become that this is just a money grab by wealthy teams and leagues who no longer care about their fans.

And you know, they would not be wrong.

At a time when the average fan is getting older and older and when pro sports have less hold on younger viewers, this is a dangerous game to play.

Fewer viewers = less revenue = lower salaries.

Which might not be the worst thing ever either—an era where the focus is on teams and not on individual players may be just what many leagues need to win back younger fans.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are a pro sports league, you need to figure out a way to make life easier for your fans. 

Maybe that means creating some sort of “All Game Pass” option that allows them to watch their favorite team wherever their games are being shown without having to subscribe to multiple services.

Or something like that—I’m not going to solve this for you for free.