AI-personalised live sports: Content for the next generation

The Premier League is now offering fans a myriad of AI-backed opportunities that did not exist even a short time ago. Microsoft’s partnership with both the Premier League and Mediakind has allowed the Premier League to create a tailored fan experience that helps people indulge in their passion. Fans can now access bespoke news, prepare for upcoming matches by finding highlights of previous games on a profile that remembers their profile and preferences. They can also change their fantasy team. 

Speaking at the “Beyond the Live Event: AI-Powered Fan Engagement for Sports” IBC conference session, Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer, Premier League, said: “Our shareholder clubs agreed to make a really material investment into our owned and operated platforms, and predominantly our digital platforms, to satisfy the theory that hundreds of millions of people are interested in the Premier League. It’s about creating bespoke appeal to our fans and drawing them closer to an ecosystem they enjoy.”  

This idea was born four years ago, according to Brass, and has been built over the last two years around the Microsoft Azure cloud platform with additional AI capabilities. “The Premier League Companion, for example, powered by Microsoft Copilot, satisfies not only specific areas of interest, articles, content, video, and narrative exchanges, but also, as of this season, Fantasy Premier League, one of our critical offerings, serving over 30 million people every season.”  

The phrase “next generation of fans” is often code for ‘younger people who grew up differently. However, according to Brass, we all belong to that next generation. “The way we consume content and what we expect of the services we engage with has changed in the last decade,” he added. “To reward the choices we are all making with our discretionary time, we need to create the personalised, bespoke, trusted, and tailored experiences which we believe will be critical going into the next decade.”  

AI is crucial to personalisation, according to Moore Macauley, Chief Architect, MediaKind. “For content discovery at ingest, we want to understand the high and lowlights of that content, and we use services from Azure to deliver that. We want to make content recommendations too and refer the right content to the right customer.”  

Everything starts with reliability, added Macauley. “It’s all very well to build a personalised experience, but if video or live streams are not delivered, it’s no good. Live streaming, content personalisation, SSAI, or ad insertion need to be hyper-reliable for sporting events where you have but one opportunity to get it right. The Premier League clearly cannot break.” Traditional technology like conditional auto-scaling algorithms sometimes can’t handle the extra demand, so to scale, Macauley works closely with technology partners to provide solutions.   

AI has also raised the bar in terms of delivering backend operations reliably, according to Macauley, allowing the use of LLMs to configure, set up, and create services on the back end to make operations significantly faster and better.  

“Whenever we have an alert, an agent running on Azure’s AI factory analyses logs and provides a troubleshooting recommendation,” he concluded. “Deploying that on our partner and customer solutions, we have a notable reduction in the estimations from tier one to engineering and a faster time resolution for escalated problems. It’s been a real benefit for our operations over the last 15 months.”