Fox Sports taps IBM Watson for AI-enabled World Cup

Fox Sports has teamed up with IBM Watson Media and IBM iX to provide fans with a Watson-powered viewer experience – The Highlights Machine – for the forthcoming FIFA World Cup from Russia.

According to IBM, the World Cup marks the first event where Fox Sports will be implementing artificial intelligence into its production and distribution systems.

Fox Sports is tapping IBM Watson Media to use AI to enrich match footage with automated, advanced metadata tagging and to quickly sift through footage to identify the most exciting match moments and push out highlight reels all in near-real time.

By analysing visual, audio, textual data as well as emotional and contextual cues like tone and geographic location within the match footage, Fox Sports producers will be able to understand what’s happening within a video, according to IBM.

The Highlights Machine will enable fans to browse FIFA’s archive of past matches to save, mark as favourite, and share custom highlight reels of teams and players.

The Highlight Machine will also be available in the FIFA World Cup section of the Fox Sports app on iOS and Android devices.