Sportradar: "What artificial intelligence will allow is that every fan or punter can now get their own tailored experience"

At ICE Barcelona last month, Sportradar showcased its latest advancements in sports technology, reaffirming its position as a leader in data-driven innovation. With a strong focus on AI-powered solutions, the company brought a 3×3 basketball demonstration to its booth, showcasing its Computer Vision technology in real-time.

In this exclusive interview with Yogonet, Luka Pataky, Senior Vice President of Automated Content at Sportradar, reflects on the company’s participation at the event, highlighting key innovations, industry trends, and the growing role of automation in enhancing both operator efficiency and player engagement.

What are some of the comments you are hearing from those who approached Sportradar's stand and explored the AI capabilities of the company?

The feedback was really positive from both clients and partners. The one thing that came across is how impressive it was to do this, with all being live. Attendees were impressed by how deep we can understand the game and track it, and then what we can deliver as a result.

The focus was on showing that this event is live and happening here, in front of your eyes. All of the products on the stand showcased their capabilities around this live event, so you can explore match tracking, betting, entertainment tools, etc. that are connected in real-time with what's unfolding.

This is something new for this type of show. We brought the event so that customers would be able to understand what the delivery process looks like in a very clear and visual way. And at the end of the day, I think it was a major success, with the reception being really positive.

How can AI improve the betting experience?

What it essentially allows us to do is collect a lot more information about the game. That, in turn, means that we can create more insights and engage users in different ways. Streaming is a major part of engagement: those who bet also like to watch the stream. They are complementary.

What we realized is that if we add more data content to the streaming, providing additional context and more insights, the punters engage for more time with the stream. At our booth, you were able to see how tracking data comes into a streaming product and how it helps operators drive engagement and effectively increase the frequency of playing.

A major focus is also the Live Tracker. This is a very engaging and entertaining tool. Tracking makes the experience more active and dynamic. It visualizes the game in real-time, with features like graphically enhanced ball spotting and on-pitch animations that bring the action to life.

There are more and more products experimenting within the AI space, which is definitely a major trend. The creation of automated commentaries, automated podcasts, automated highlights... There are a lot of new products based around AI, which ultimately empower operators to monetize and engage their customers more efficiently and for a longer time.

Would it be fair to say that, ultimately, fan engagement is the major goal of applying artificial intelligence in the betting experience?

It absolutely is a major game-changer for fan engagement. One of the major opportunities it brings is personalization, and even what has been termed hyper-personalization. What artificial intelligence will allow is that every fan or punter can get their own experience, which is something that a couple of years ago was not imaginable. Companies often try to create experiences for some clusters of users — but here we are talking about hyper-personalized, which is one step further. 

Another major aspect is hyper-immersive experiences, which we showcased at ICE with our NBA virtual tracker, where you can practically immerse yourself completely in a 3D virtual world. We are talking about the live event being radically transformed into a virtual world, with any fan or user able to position themselves anywhere on that field and watch the game in their own way. We will see huge advancements within this field.

The third major area is generative AI and its immense power. When you feed it with a lot of data, it's really impressive how much insightful and useful content you can get out of it. As I mentioned earlier, commentaries and podcasts are two areas of application.

We brought the AI Lab to ICE, where they showcased the creation of automated podcasts. Every operator could potentially have a podcast created after every game automatically. They only need a lot of data and some good AI technology and they can have podcasts that will announce the next games, offer pre-match and post-game analysis... You don't need to have a huge editorial team to offer interesting content to keep users longer on the platform.

Would you describe Spotradar as an AI-first company or as an early adopter of artificial intelligence?

Absolutely. I actually wanted to bring up that concept — AI-first. When you look at all the products that we showcased, they are AI-first. This is important because by leveraging AI, we can offer those personalized and immersive experiences I described before.

The idea behind the exhibit was to show how AI improves the product and that it's not just a buzzword. You can see how we collect data using AI and how we then create an actual product that can increase engagement.

Our Alpha Odds is another product that is heavily AI-driven. Operators know that with it, margins are a lot better. We can prove that with numbers. Our approach is to always show the benefits of what we do in terms of products and technology.