Olympics AI: How Al Michaels' Fake Voice Won Gold (and You Can Too)
Highlight reels narrated by a famous sports voice? Yes, they did - and you can too. How new tech could pay for all those sports rights, reinvent reality TV and make content Gen Z/Alpha love
What an incredible Olympics! Did you see Simone Biles’ gold-winning vault? Or the pommel horse guy? Or the definitely-not-an-assassin Turkish shooter? And we’ll always have Raygun (Rachael Gunn), the Australian, uh, interpretative breakdancer?
If you get these references, the question might not be, “Did you see it?” and more “When and where did you see it?” For a good chunk of you, I’m guessing it wasn’t on NBC’s linear channel — and it almost certainly wasn’t live.
I have to give credit to the Comcast and NBCU crew who were very forward thinking this Olympic cycle. They know that audiences are increasingly time-shifting away from live, near-live and linear. How did they engage all these casual viewers — who all have different preferences for different sports and not a lot of time — while still keeping them on your platform?
One answer: AI.
If you’re a Peacock subscriber, you may have come across “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock,” which provided 10-minute Olympic highlights packages each day, personalized to your preference. There were about 7 million ways these clips could be packaged together, pulling from more than 5,000 hours of coverage. The cherry on top was that an AI version of Al Michaels (yes, very much alive) narrated these recaps. In this case, AI is not just a cost-saving tool, but it’s providing a product that would be literally impossible to produce otherwise. As I wrote about in my last column, if studios are going to embrace AI, they have to create new experiences and make money.
Going into this Olympics, prognosticators were skeptical the games could command the cultural conversation like the old days. On July 25, the day before the opening ceremony, the pollster Gallup reported: “Summer Olympics Poised to Have Record-Low U.S. Viewership.”
“Do you believe in miracles?” Viewership was up 82 percent compared with the 2021 Tokyo Games and delivered more than 30 million viewers per day, split between linear and streaming. Comcast did what seems impossible in this day and age: It actually built a bigger audience, capturing 26 percent of all linear viewing in the U.S. the week of July 29.
AI Al Michaels can’t take all the credit, but what I’ll call highlight reel AI — using AI to sift through mountains of footage to find the best stuff for your interests and create storylines — is a glimpse of what’s to come. As live events become the saving grace for not just linear television but also streamers looking to build advertising businesses (all of them), here’s an AI application, which works today, with the potential to bring in new fans and absorb existing ones.
And this is absolutely about more than sports. Highlight reel AI gives streamers the tools to make any live and unscripted event — awards shows, reality programs, live reality reunion shows — into appointment viewing. Along the way, with a bit of imagination, it might just even help pay for those rising sports rights fees. (If you have any doubt about the value of such content to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, read my colleague Matthew Frank’s piece about Deadpool & Wolverine.)
In this article, you’ll learn:
The multibillion-dollar opportunity staring studios in the face through using the same kind of technology used by the Olympics
How highlight reel AI could revolutionize not only sports but the editing of all unscripted programming
The two major AI tools that already let studios and producers create Gen Z and Gen Alpha-friendly clips today
Why eventually, every streaming app needs to work more like Instagram (this is the future of ad tech, too)
What Hollywood doesn’t yet understand about why young people spend so much time on social media
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