Erik Gruenwedel

February 21, 2023

Comcast Feb. 21 announced it has received a technology and engineering Emmy award for its sports viewing experiences across the Xfinity, Sky and Peacock platforms. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognized Comcast for using artificial intelligence to provide viewers with an easier way to catch up on key moments from live sporting events.

Specifically, Comcast’s VideoAI technology analyzes video streams in real-time and detects key moments using various audio, visual and textual cues. For sports, these include points/goals, penalties, and other major moments. As the live event unfolds, indexed highlights are compiled as they happen into an interactive format, giving viewers a quick summary of the most important highlights after the play/moment has concluded.

“[Artificial intelligence] is a transformative technology, giving us the ability to rethink how we deliver innovative entertainment experiences to our global customers,” Fraser Stirling, global chief product officer, at Comcast, said in a statement.

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NBCUniversal bowed the AI technology on Peacock for its Premier League soccer matches. “Peacock Key Plays” puts highlights as they happen on an interactive timeline that can be accessed at any point during a live match, giving customers the ability to watch just one key moment or all of them as a playlist.

On Xfinity, AI is available on DVR recordings of select events like the FIFA Soccer World Cup, tagging key plays in the recording’s playback bar, giving viewers a quick way to recap all the biggest moments. Xfinity recently made Sports Highlights available for the FIFA World Cup and plans to extend the feature to more sports this year.

Comcast is now offering the technology to distribution customers as part of its product suite, producing actionable metadata to drive a continuously expanding number of use cases, from content discovery to contextual advertising.