The Australian Open is offering digitally animated near-live versions of all matches for free on YouTube. Reactions have been, well, mixed, with some viewers finding it “fun,” “interesting” and “fire,” while some have called it “bloody ridiculous”.
The AO is the first big professional tennis tournament of 2025 and is taking place in Melbourne. While viewers in Australia can watch the coverage on Nine, Tennis Australia is also offering fans to watch this alternative format.
The videos are enhanced with commentators and comments streaming in from users while viewers sit back and watch the matches.
It’s all part of a project called AO Animated and it has taken off at this year’s grand slam tournament at Melbourne Park. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have tuned into this digital vision of the AO.
The AO Animated technology debuted at the grand slam last year. It saw audiences peak for the recording of the men’s final, with almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Popularity is even higher this year, with the matches apparently attracting four times as many viewers as in 2024.
The Australian Open don’t own all of their broadcasting rights (fairly common), so they’re live-streaming a Wii Tennis-like version of the matches on YouTube – love this 😂
This is Carlos Alcaraz’ match point: pic.twitter.com/HvxhYneWGH
— Bastien Fachan (@BastienFachan) January 13, 2025
It follows a recent trend in sports broadcasting, which sees the use of motion capture and AI technology to mimic live games digitally and in real time. Video game-like avatars are brought to life using real-world data in an emerging category of sports broadcasting.
“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,” he said.
“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,” Machar Reid, director of innovation, Tennis Australia told The Guardian.
Sensors on the court feed data into a system that produces digital reproductions, seeing only a two minute delay. These reproductions feature the same commentary and arena noises that would be heard on live TV, synced with the timing of the digital version of the match.
Before the AO, the Simpsons played an NFL game on Disney+ in December 2024. The NHL took a similar route, featuring Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes stars playing a match.
While this new trend might signal a hope to bring in new or younger viewers, they also provide regular fans with a real time way to watch events without showing any real footage of it. Which means you don’t have to deal with broadcast rights.
However, the digital games also hope to attract the attention of gaming communities.
“It’s that community that engages with animated or virtual or gaming products, that’s our intuition, right? There’s an immediate kind of blending of those two worlds and that’s instinctively where we’re positioning it for the moment,” Reid added to The Guardian.
