The Melbourne cartoon was drawn not from video, but from tracking data
AO Animated was not a filter applied to the footage. Sports Video Group described it during the 2025 tournament as a YouTube stream fed by 12 cameras behind the players and the ball, each capturing 29 points on the human skeleton at 50 frames per second, turning graphics engines into cartoon players. Tennis Australia’s head of broadcast and media operations Josh Lee said a “talented in-house team of innovators” created the updates with “real-time player and ball tracking data and unreal rendering engines”.
The reason for building it that way was contractual. Front Office Sports reports that ESPN owns the US rights to the tournament and that the animation solution allows Tennis Australia to grow its audience on YouTube without breaching its broadcast deals. The show was about two minutes behind and synchronized to live commentary, crowd and chair ref calls.
Machar Reid, Tennis Australia’s director of innovation, is not over the moon. Limb tracking meant “12 cameras trying to work out the silhouette of a person in real time,” he told The Guardian, as B&T delivered it, and the system still couldn’t get a handle on it; “we don’t have fingers.” Front Office Sports noted that the avatars are not perfect replicas, although their clothing and headgear match the actual players.
The solution turned out to be what broadcasters wanted
In the second year, the audience increased. According to Tennis Australia’s tally, reported by Front Office Sports and Sports Video Group, AO Animated garnered more than 950,000 views over the first four days of the 2025 event, compared to around 140,000 for the same period last year. The rights holders noticed. Eurosport and beIN Sports have added the stream to their own streaming services, and Lee said during the week two Tennis Australia were supplying it to three broadcast partners.
By 2026, the cartoon had settled into a rights system it was designed to circumvent. The tournament’s own broadcast release that year listed AO Animated as available via ESPN, Eurosport and Stan Sport and called it a “mixed reality experience”. The same release announced the event’s first continuous 24-hour global stream, which it said added more than 180 hours of content for broadcast partners.
The players split up. Carlos Alcaraz told The Associated Press that the animated version was “a good alternative,” while Leila Fernandez called the more accurate avatars “fun and weird.” Reid admitted the obvious. “Obviously, it’s not for everyone.” Numbers deserve the same caution. They came from a tournament and were counting views, which doesn’t say anything about how long anyone has left.
Tiley’s first US Open as head of the USTA signed a market that appreciates his games
The executive who led Melbourne through those trials moved to the US Open in 2026. Tennis Majors reported in February that Craig Tiley, chief executive of Tennis Australia since 2013 and director of the Australian Open since 2006, would become chief executive of the USTA. The Block, citing Front Office Sports, reports that he took over on July 20 and was instrumental in the deal that followed weeks later.
That deal made Kalsh the official prediction market partner of the US Open. Sports Video Group said on Sept. 1 that the multi-year agreement began with the 2026 singles main draw and gave Kalshi a presence on the tournament’s digital platforms and on-court signage. Kalshi said his tennis trading volume has grown 25-fold year-on-year. The two sides established an integrity framework that limited markets linked to referee decisions and code violations, and Tiley said the deal allows the tournament to “lead the next generation of fan engagement while ensuring the integrity of our sport.”
It came together quickly. According to The Block, the USTA planned to consider market partners for future years, and the agreement was not finalized until after qualifying. Front Office Sports reported that rival prediction market platforms were banned from advertising at the event and on ESPN broadcasts; The USTA and ESPN did not immediately comment. A Kalshi blog post about the price of the women’s draw, published earlier in the day the deal was reported, still included a line saying the company was “not affiliated with the US Open or the WTA.”
That post shows a close-up of what the new number looks like. To win the title, traders had Aryna Sabalenka – 23%, Coco Gauff – 16%, Iga Sviatek – 15%. Read plainly, the market gave the rest of the field a 77% chance against the favorite.
Two days before the deal was announced, a federal appeals court sided with state gaming regulators v. Kalshi; The Ninth Circuit’s Aug. 28 decision, which The Block reports, contradicts an earlier Third Circuit decision. Until the courts resolve that split, whether state gambling laws reach a company’s sports contracts may vary from state to state.
Kalshi was a partner at the US Open. The gambling review site presents the entire category elsewhere. among reviews on playUSA:prediction markets have their own headline alongside online casinos and social and gaming casinos, where it says the team has “tested hundreds of platforms across every gaming vertical available in the US.”
Wimbledon added programmatic sound to its highlight videos and kept live human commentary
Before any cartoon or price, Wimbledon transferred some of the commentary to the software. IBM announced in June 2023 that generative AI built on its watsonx platform will narrate all tournament highlights video packages on the Wimbledon app and website, with captions that fans can turn on or off. IBM said the model was trained in the “unique language of tennis” and called the feature a step toward commentary for matches outside of show courts, where there were already live commentators.
Borders were part of history from the beginning. Tennis Majors was reporting at the time that the service would be separate from the BBC’s coverage and would be very limited, with replacement of live commentators remaining “a long way off”. The live microphones stayed with the people. The software picked up the videos and Osama Al-Kassab, the club’s director of marketing and commercial, said fans could hear commentary on a “wider range of games”.
Three years later, the voice had become a conversation. IBM’s release for the 2026 championship, played from late June to mid-July, describes Match Chat, an AI assistant that answers typed questions such as “What’s happened in the match so far?” from live match data using Wimbledon editorial-style trained models. The partnership dates back more than 35 years, with the launch of the website in 1995 and the app in 2009. It was described as an assistant alongside the game, rather than a machine that called it live.
The US Open app’s odds of winning are obtained without published experience
The tournament’s own app created the second possibility. IBM announcement for the 2026 tournament The ‘Probability to Win’ feature, as it’s popularly called, will work for all singles matches, calculating each player’s chance from current and historical stats, expert opinion and game momentum, while a new highlights feature explains swings. IBM and the USTA have been collaborating since 1992, the release states.
Another feature resonated with Melbourne. The same release introduced Serve Quality, which was designed to track 21 points on each server’s body and 50 rackets per second across all 254 singles matches, roughly 1.2 billion data points during the tournament. IBM called the limb tracking method, a technique Reid had described in Melbourne, which focused on analysis instead of animation.
IBM has also provided evidence that fans want it. A Morning Consult survey commissioned by IBM found that 91% of global tennis fans use sports apps during events, and report high trust (64%) in AI-powered sports content. The counterbalance is clear. The software company commissioned the survey, the release didn’t give any numbers on how often the model’s favorite actually won, and “expert opinion” was included in the data, so the number isn’t pure statistics either.
Define that, in addition to the market price, the fan has two odds for the same game that are constructed in opposite ways. The app number comes from a model with no money on it and no published accuracy record. The seller comes from people with money and an unresolved legal issue with the product. Nothing on the screen says what to do when they disagree.
Following the match now means choosing which number to believe
Watching tennis used to show one confidence in the picture and the person describing it. The fan is currently making several, and each one needs its own question. Is the picture live or reconstructed two minutes after the game? Is the voice written by a person trained in the style of the house or a model? Has anyone posted the odds record? And the price comes from a product that the gambling review site ranks alongside casinos with its legal status still before the courts.
None of this makes the new layers useless. AO Animated has given fans the ability to follow live matches on YouTube, which would otherwise prohibit rights deals, and Match Chat, IBM describes, saves fans searching through stats across multiple screens. A habit worth building is asking what each number is made of and how old it is. Kalshi’s 23% was the reading for Sabalenka from the day the main draw began, and it said nothing about the afternoon.
Every post at PlayUSA X performs the minute it comes out, and that stamp is the detail missing the live numbers; app probability and market price may change after each point, so any age screenshot before sharing it. Kalshi is under contract for several years, so Price will likely return to Flushing Meadows next summer, and the question of which number to trust will return with it.