Is AI the future of sports production?

For two weeks every summer, the centre of the tennis world is in the London suburb of Wimbledon. Millions of tennis fans follow the action. They want scores, they want player and tournament information. And they want the highlights.

With an average of three matches per day on each of the six main show courts, hundreds of hours of video can quickly mount up. It could take hours to pull together highlight packages.

But with AI platform IBM Watson, the All England Lawn Tennis Association (AELTA) is able to assemble full highlight reels of live events within five minutes of the end of a match, some two to 10 hours more quickly than before.

It does so using…