Wimbledon benefits from artificial intelligence inroads

The Wimbledon-IBM relationship is 30 years strong, and at the 2019 Championships, it took a digital turn for the better.

The winners: fans everywhere, whether members of the ardent tennis Twitterati or casual sports viewers.

At issue: improving on how the Wimbledon digital team and its partners package highlights from dozens of matches across 18 courts in the early stages of Wimbledon, notably in the fortnight's first week before the wheat is winnowed from the chaff, so to speak.

The solution: teaching technology, a sibling capability to IBM's heralded Watson computer, to determine what makes for a thrilling point of tennis play.

As Sam Seddon, IBM's sports and entertainment sponsorship lead in the U.K., posited to Digital Trends: "How do you break news and deliver content faster than the global media organizations? When the product you’re needing to present is 18 tennis matches happening at the same time, that’s a huge amount of content."

This artificial intelligence lent itself to these Championships in ways unlike it did in 2018, when, per Digital Trends, Wimbledon produced 20 million digital videos, 14 million of which were created by A.I. A "slightly more primitive model" gave way to 2019's version 2.0.

There have been bumps—unforced errors?—along the way, as Wimbledon's digital marketing lead, Alexandra Willis, noted to an NPR interviewer: "For a while, player gestures, it was picking up this movement—wiping your face—and thinking, is that some kind of celebration? Actually, it was the player saying, 'I want my towel.' So that's the whole beauty of this, is that we have to test it and learn it constantly."

It remains to be seen whether technology can truly replace human highlight-package editors. But IBM's A.I. tools can deliver match-specific "sizzle reels" in just two minutes after they conclude, in roughly one-tenth of the time that it takes a person to create the same multimedia asset.

Advantage: A.I. But it's not "game, set, and match" just yet. This example of high tech can't yet replace those people who know the nuances of personalities, atmospheres, etc., involved in such globally renowned arenas.