By Miheer Walavalkar, CEO & co-founder, LiveLike.

The entire industry spent 2025 talking about AI. But while everyone debated whether generative AI would replace commentary teams or automate highlight reels, they missed the bigger story; AI isn’t just changing how broadcasts are made, it’s fundamentally redefining what a broadcast even is.

We’re witnessing the death of the passive viewing experience. The question for 2026 isn’t whether AI will make production more efficient (it will), but whether broadcasters are ready for fans who expect to participate, not just watch.

The tech lag problem

An uncomfortable truth is that sports organisations are spectacularly good at packaging and monetising intellectual property, but (in some cases) they’re painfully behind on how consumers interact with content. While fans learned new engagement patterns on TikTok, Reddit and Fortnite, sports properties remained stuck in ‘lean-back’ mode – broadcast a linear feed, hope people watch, sell the same generic ad to everyone.

This worked fine when media rights kept climbing and cable bundles trapped audiences. But 2025 exposed the cracks. With direct-to-consumer platforms proliferating and switching costs near zero, leagues suddenly care about metrics they’ve never tracked: churn rates, net promoter scores, customer acquisition costs. When ESPN tells YouTube TV subscribers to sign up directly to their app, the intermediary era is clearly ending.

Most sports organisations were never built to be technology companies. They’re now competing for attention against platforms that have spent billions perfecting recommendation algorithms and engagement loops. A 12-year-old in Jakarta expects their sports app to work like their favourite game. Instead, they often get a clunky video player and a fixture list.

Where AI actually matters

The AI conversation has been dominated by production efficiency – automated camera tracking, AI-generated commentary, instant highlight packages. These are table stakes. The real transformation is happening in the fan experience layer.

AI enables something sports has never done at scale: the ability to treat different fans differently. Not just by what they’ve purchased, but by how they behave, what motivates them, and where they are in their journey from casual viewer to obsessive super-fan.

A fan who chooses to just dip into a game shouldn’t see the same content and offers as a corporate box holder. The fan who completes every prediction game but never buys merchandise is expressing a different type of fandom than someone who owns the kit but rarely engages digitally. AI can orchestrate these journeys in real-time, showing the right content, commerce opportunity, or community experience at precisely the right moment.

We saw glimpses of this in 2025. Major League Baseball teams used gamification and loyalty programmes that tracked not just ticket purchases but engagement behaviours – games played, content consumed, attendance streaks. LIV Golf built a global membership programme that keeps fans engaged between events across continents, using AI to understand which challenges and rewards resonate in different markets.

But these are early experiments. The real unlock comes when AI stops being a backend efficiency tool and becomes the orchestration layer for the entire fan experience.

The interactive broadcast

2026 is interesting because we’re going to start moving beyond personalisation (showing you different content) towards participation (letting you shape the experience).

Fans already influence outcomes in limited ways – All-Star voting, fantasy leagues, Formula E’s fan boost mechanic. But AI makes it possible to scale this dramatically. Imagine broadcasts where your viewing choices – which camera angles you select, which stats you dive into – feed back into what the broadcaster emphasises for similar fans. Or prediction markets where your track record earns you credibility that affects your visibility in the community.

During the 2022 World Cup, Coca-Cola ran a Battle of the Fans campaign where fans made promises, formed teams and competed nationally, all tracked digitally with points rolling up to country totals. It drove massive engagement and first-party data collection. Now imagine that extended to physical activity: running, cycling, steps taken, all feeding into team competitions that run parallel to broadcast events.

The technology is ready. Wearables, computer vision, real-time data pipelines, AI agents that can design engagement mechanics, these all exist today. The question is whether broadcasters are willing to fundamentally rethink their relationship with fans.

The uncomfortable predictions

For 2026, I’ll make three predictions that will probably annoy people.

First, virtual reality will remain a novelty for live sports viewing. I say this as someone who started a company in VR. The demos are impressive, but the current TV-plus-second-screen experience is already excellent. Mass adoption of VR for watching matches is at least five years away, probably longer.

Second, Web3 and blockchain will continue to search for meaningful use cases in fan engagement. Crypto has real utility in payments. But NFT-style fan engagement has mostly delivered gimmicks, not utility. 2026 won’t be the year blockchain ‘fixes’ fan engagement.

Third – and this is the big one – AI will create a two-tier industry. Top-tier leagues with massive media rights deals will use AI to optimise everything, but their business models won’t fundamentally change in 2026. For emerging properties and non-tier-1 leagues, AI-driven direct fan monetisation will become existential. In a world of infinite content (much of it AI-generated), these properties can’t rely on traditional broadcast deals. Their survival depends on going deep with core fans, using AI to personalise journeys and monetise at scale.

From viewers to participants

The biggest shift coming in 2026 isn’t technological, it’s philosophical. Broadcasters need to stop thinking about ‘viewers’ and start thinking about ‘participants’. That means designing experiences where fan behaviour actually matters, where engagement drives personalised outcomes, and where the line between watching and playing becomes deliberately blurred.

We’re already seeing capital flow towards this vision. Investors are backing immersive venues such as F1 Arcade and participatory concepts that make sports more accessible. Governing bodies are experimenting with tech-enabled talent pathways that track development from grassroots to elite.

The age of the interactive broadcast isn’t about technology replacing humans or AI doing everything automatically. It’s about giving fans agency, recognising that their engagement data is valuable, and building experiences where participation is rewarded with genuinely personalised, meaningful outcomes.

2026 will separate the broadcasters who understand this from those who think AI is just about cutting production costs. The ones who get it right won’t just survive the direct-to-consumer transition, they’ll thrive in it.