The ESPN personality Mike Greenberg was feeling the excitement. Standing at a downtown Manhattan studio on Tuesday, one of the most famous members of the masochistic cult known as New York Jets fandom had just been told by the network’s top tech execs about a personalized AI version of ESPN’s flagship show.
“Can we have one version of a personalized Sports Center where the Jets win the Super Bowl?” he asked. “I’ve never seen it happen. Maybe AI can make the impossible come true.”
ESPN has a problem. Most commonly that’s expressed as a shrinking number of cable viewers and the lowered subscription and ad revenue that comes with it. But really it’s a cultural problem: a generation raised on pro sports as a participatory activity, with social media and video games and fantasy play, sees little need for ESPN’s top-down, big-personality, appointment-viewing brand of content.
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So technology has arrived, as it so often does lately, to save the day. Maybe. On Thursday an ambitious new ESPN streaming app will take flight, but carefully, so as not to unravel the still-formidable revenue that comes from everything outside it. When it launches, the $29.99/month service will offer access to all 47,000 of the network’s annual live events, all its studio shows and all its 30 for 30 and other library content — pretty much anything ESPN ever has aired or ever will air. In the brief history of phone applications, perhaps no product has ever given us that much professional video in our pockets.
Toss in a $39.99 bundle with Fox One (like all of these pricey but still cheaper than a cable subscription) and another bundle with the NFL Network that includes Red Zone (the latter launches just before the season next month), and sports content will soon be burning up your phone’s motherboard.
Yet that still may not be enough to entice younger viewers. So ESPN brass has come up with a more personalized twist. You can go deep down the stat and video-clip rabbit hole of your go-to team with a new feature called “Verts.” You can shop, get betting info and scour fantasy updates right next to a broadcast. And, yes, in one of the more eerie but potentially prescient developments, you can personalize Sports Center, complete with AI-generated clips based on your team preferences and even an automated announcer voice trained on the actual voices of four personalities, including Hannah Storm and Omar Raja. (It can’t change unwanted results — yet).
“Today we really are on the verge of another industry-shaping moment,” ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro told a group of reporters Tuesday shortly before Greenberg’s AI comment. “Fans don’t just want to watch. They want to experience; they want to interact.”
It is an audacious statement. Not because it isn’t true — it very much is. But can ESPN offer this level of interactivity? Young viewers want to be able to play Madden and NBA 2K25; they want to curate and sometimes create video clips; they even want to shift in-game point of view and toggle announcers. None of this really fits with what ESPN traditionally does.
All of this, it should be said, is possible with video games and even sometimes via the immersive apps of Meta’s Quest and other mixed-reality platforms. But is it possible with a company that for 45 years has, no matter the window-dressing, basically employed the same model: buy rights to games, run clips from games, and have highly paid and sharply coiffed personalities talk about games? Can something so one-directional, so expensively legacy-media, be combined with something this grassroots, this user-generated, this 2025?
Even ESPN executives acknowledge the boldness; a P.R. exec on Tuesday, taking the stage to a Seal song, noted how the lyric of “we’re never going to survive unless we get a little crazy” felt fitting.
Perhaps nothing represents the belief the network can pull this off more than Sports Center For You. Engineers have used an undisclosed Large Language Model to pull clips and generate voice-over for as many as thousands of possible combinations that may in the end only be seen by a few people. One got the sense watching the presentation that this was really the future as ESPN saw it — a way of both automating and customizing entire video segments so they would feel like they were created for a particular individual (and cost the network a lot less to produce besides).
The argument isn’t without merit – since ESPN already has rights to these clips there isn’t much of the copyright concern bedeviling its parent company. And since so much of the content is based on professional clips, the possibility of slop is more limited. Who wouldn’t want to see clips of a game that would never make the big show, or even the same clip shaded to how we were feeling. Execs Tuesday talked of how a Dodgers-Padres clip package could be tilted by the AI voice to sound more excited about a particular team depending on which club it knew you rooted for, sports-highlight shows as your old comfy pair of slippers.
There’s even been talk, one ESPN source said, of using AI to bring back anchors gone from the network or this mortal coil, sports-highlight shows as as resurrection devices. (Just look to rival NBCUniversal for how this could play out: NBC used AI to recreate the voice of famed ’90s era NBA narrator Jim Fagan, who died in 2017, for promo spots about the league’s return to the network for this season.)
Still, how easily these customization plays can be integrated with the existing model — one got the sense from the announcement about the four personalities game for the AI replication that many more were not — remains to be seen.
And other on-demand features, while cool-sounding, are not sure things, including clicking on a player during a game broadcast to follow their real-time fantasy numbers (“the holy grail,” said one executive, “but not possible yet”) or shopping for merch after your team wins. “You watch Ty Simpson break a passing record and then one-tap and you can buy his jersey,” said ESPN marketing chief Tina Thornton, referring to the Alabama quarterback, in an ecommerce integration that has been a kind of Dippin’ Dots of TV tech, always the stuff of the future.
And don’t forget the money that drives the train. ESPN’s operating income may have fallen by 17 percent in the Jan-March quarter as sports-right costs keep rising while the number of linear viewers keeps falling. But it still clocked in at nearly $650 million.
The pull of the old model is evidenced in a surprising distribution turn: once new carriage deals are completed, Pitaro says, all cable subscribers can access the app content at no charge, none of those current pesky extra ESPN+ fees tacked on. This is a boon for those still clinging to the cord, but it underscores just how tricky the tightrope really is: ESPN and Disney will give up a lot of revenue doing this, landing just a few monthly bucks per subscriber from the cable company compared to the thirty monthly dollars they’d get going directly to the consumer, not to mention lose a streaming subscriber they can boast about to Wall Street. But the cable model is still powerful enough to make concessions for.
Back in the mid-2000’s ESPN launched ESPN Mobile, a proprietary service and phone (literally, you got your own ESPN-branded flip device) that would feed you all kinds of real-time text updates. The idea was as gleaming as it was untenable: not enough people wanted to pay hundreds more dollars to see a score on a flip phone, and the company soon gave up the ghost. Still, the pitch was compelling: find a way to use pocket technologies to monetize our sports obsessions.
Two decades later ESPN believes the tech and the economics have caught up. Smartphones and 5G have made sports-video ubiquitous, and next-gen tech like AI makes interactivity and customization a reality. Is looking back to the future like this crazy? A little. But the survival of the company just may depend on it.