While the Masters is rooted in tradition, with many decades of history on the course, this weekend’s action will have a very different look, thanks to technology. In a first for a golf tournament, nearly every one of the more than 20,000 shots that will take place on the green will be available for near immediate viewing on the Masters' website, within just five minutes of the player hitting the ball.
This capability is possible due to IBM’s artificial intelligence platform Watson. The company will produce three-minute highlight videos for each round of the tournament. This effort began at last year’s Masters when IBM analyzed nearly 4,000 shots and this year that figure could increase five-fold.
The AI technology will help produce the “Round in Three Minutes” feature videos, which will enable golf fans to experience nearly all of the shots in greatly abbreviated packaging as compared to watching the tournament in its entirety. These highlights packages were previously created manually by Masters’ staff, but by teaming up with IBM they will now allow Watson to scan through thousands of shots, many taking place concurrently, and choose the most memorable moments of each round for the highlights. Footage leading up to each of its chosen highlighted moments will also be included in order to provide context for each chosen shot. The Masters specifically requested this feature so fans can better understand the larger storylines of the tournament while watching small pieces.
“We know the player, the shot, the hole they’re on, and we can automatically curate a highlight reel,” said John Kent, the program manager for IBM Sports and Entertainment Partnerships. “Think of it like a playlist of shots to play in sequence. We want to show the shots leading up to it to tell the story.”
In order to accomplish these highlights, IBM will be unveiling its OpenScale capability, which adds nuance and aims to remove bias in determining which shots to include. Factors that will be considered to identify the most significant shots include "excitement levels of sound, visual content, and motion” as well as celebrations and crowd noise.. Watson will also consider on-course factors such as ball location, shot length, hole yardage and whether the shot ended in the water or sand for its highlight packages.
The challenge in trying to strip Watson of potential biases, for example, is how to compare an average shot by a star player, like Jordan Speith, to an excellent shot by a player with less recognition. With the biggest name players commanding the largest audiences and drawing the most eyeballs to the action, the software will need to interpret what makes ideal sense for its highlight packages based primarily on the skill involved in the shot itself.
This technological infusion to the Masters will impact not only on how the tournament is viewed but how the editorial staffs for golf tournaments and other professional sports jobs could be changing with the creeping mainstream visibility of artificial technology.
“Everyone’s jobs are going to change because of artificial intelligence,” Kent said. “The Masters’ editorial team, their job has changed. They’re still curating content, but they’re getting assistance from an AI to help them produce at scale.”
Tasks that were previously done manually will now be performed at a much higher level of efficiency due to artificial intelligence platforms like Watson, which will drastically change how fans watch the rounds. Telecasts showing players walking between holes and shots of the course itself and the crowd will be curtailed as the Watson highlight packages will include only a minimal amount of extraneous footage. The result is that fans will have the chance to just focus on the shots and the best action if that is how they want to consume the tournament.
Given that sports want to expand their potential audience capacity and that younger fans are increasingly looking to view sports and other entertainment in smaller, easy to unpack formats, it would appear that this Watson effort by the Masters could yield strong results. It could be especially valuable in the first two days of the tournament as the field of competitors is much larger, before cuts heading into the weekend, giving fans a way to view top shots by a larger group of golfers than what they would be relying on from the CBS broadcast. As IBM and the governing bodies of professional sports learn more about the capabilities of artificial intelligence and the way fans want to utilize the technology, it can be assured that endeavors like this will become more and more frequent in the future.
