ESPN Wide World of Sports
How AI helps ESPN to stream youth sports at scale (without a single camera operator)
ESPN’s Wide World of Sports, a sprawling 220-acre complex set within Florida’s Disney World Resort, plays host to up to 400 games every weekend. And each team that competes across its fields, tracks and courts bring with them a dedicated following of friends, family and fans desperate to see the action, both in the stands and around the globe.
But even for one of the industry’s largest broadcasters, streaming youth and amateur sport at such a large scale presented a colossal challenge. The solution wasn’t a ‘touch of Disney magic’ — Rather, it was the power of Spiideo, the leader in automated sports video capture.
Utilizing a total of 30 fixed and mobile Spiideo cameras, the venue can capture lightning-fast feeds for the thousands of games it hosts each year. Every event is automatically recorded using the most advanced AI AutoFollow™ technology, trained to follow the specific game action across all major sports. Transmitting over the cloud to a third-party streaming platform via Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), ESPN can effortlessly broadcast multiple events to fans in 4K quality, all through a single camera operator every time: Spiideo.
The Spiideo broadcasts have been received well. A lot of people are surprised that there’s not a camera operator actually controlling the camera — That’s how well it follows the gameplay
With AI handling the cameras, production teams can focus on monitoring and enhancing their streams through Spiideo Play, Spiideo’s cloud-based broadcasting platform. Providing the tools to watch over multiple games simultaneously, and the ability to update the scoreboard with the click of a button, ESPN can now offer the star treatment to every team that passes through the Wide World of Sports complex.
