SVG Sit-Down: Diversified's Jared Timmins on AI for Broadcast Sports and Creating the Smart Venue' A look over the horizon at what the transition will look like By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Friday, December 19, 2025 - 7:00 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Sports and artificial intelligence are in a fraught pas de deux at the moment, each both needful and wary of the other. Meanwhile, broadcast sports is in multilayered flux, with massive payouts for rights even as the media landscape consolidates and looks for cost-cutting solutions. AI seems to offer some remedies but at an as-yet unknown cost.
At the same time, the value of sports globally has never been higher - revenues at $2.65 trillion make it the ninth-largest industry on the planet - while AI's still-nebulous worth is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions. Thus, any way that sports and AI intersect is inevitably impactful to both.
AV systems integrator Diversified has put technology systems into stadiums, arenas, and broadcast facilities for many of sports' top brands - among them Comcast/NBC and Monumental Sports & Entertainment - and venues -the MLB Giants' Oracle Park, Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden. SVG asked Diversified SVP, Innovation, Jared Timmins to parse this imminent intersection, to see what it can mean to broadcast sports and the people who work in its engine rooms.
Diversified's Jared Timmins: I think one of the greatest opportunities that we have with the aging population [of broadcast technicians] is to having those people embrace AI to teach AI how they think about the decisions that they make.
What does the senior vice president of innovation at Diversified do?
My mandate is to look at the technological trends across all the markets that we serve, including the sports market, and start to build out the next-generation tech stacks, workflows, skillsets that we need as an organization to maintain our market presence and grow the business across all aspects of Diversified. I look at technology from the futurist perspective and then work with my team to develop the roadmaps of how we bring that technology into our offering set.
You've said, We're getting close to the point where a director will just talk to an AI, which will run the entire show. Instead of a technical crew switching cameras or managing graphics, the AI will listen, watch the feed, and make changes automatically, enabling high-level production at a fraction of the cost. What are the implications of that for those who work in the technical side of the broadcast-sports sector?
I tend to look at AI more as a people amplifier than as a replacement for people. I think there are certain jobs that will shift and change, but, as you look through any change, all the way back to the spinning jenny, it didn't necessarily remove jobs; it opened up the opportunity for those jobs to evolve, maybe to become more creative.
I do think you will see reductions - we see reductions now - and I think it'd be Pollyannaish to act like AI wasn't going to impact the marketplace. But, for those specialized roles that are doing creative things, the object of the clientele I'm talking about is not replacement of people but being able to have those people do more with less.
I think the trend we see across all of sports is that it's really the emerging experiences outside of the main game, the personalization that we can bring outside of the main feed that starts to open up individualized options, experiences that bring new kinds of viewers into physical stadiums or into broadcast engagement that looks much more like a social experience than necessarily a broadcast event.
To do that, we need to be able to produce a lot of different variants with the same staff or less staff than we have today. I don't necessarily believe that all staff is going to be replaced by AI, but I definitely think that, when it comes to creating stories and things like that, the focus changes to being much more creative and much more personalized than we see today.
People on the technical end of broadcast sports may have to get creative now and then as part of, say, a workaround for a signal-path problem. More broadly, can AI replace that kind of capability?
I'm not sure if replacement's the right terminology. I think the workflows are going to get more complicated because they're going to get broader and are going to be more focused on different consumer types. You're still going to need technical people to manage those systems, to operate those systems, but the way they're operating them and what they're doing is going to be drastically, I think, different. Instead of thinking is AI going to replace my job, [ask] how would you do your job differently if you had an unlimited resource of AI to accomplish your outcomes?
How do you train people for that kind of future, particularly those who've been doing it conventionally for decades?
It may sound kind of reductive, but AI is the best teacher on how to embrace AI. I say, particularly to young people out of school and people wanting to get into technical opportunities, you should be using AI every moment of every day to help with any of the questions that you have.
I think one of the greatest opportunities that we have with the aging population [of broadcast technicians] is that there's a real sense of, how do I add legacy to the end of my career? Instead of thinking that AI is going to replace these people, what we've been doing is having those people embrace AI to teach AI how they think about the decisions that they make. Their legacy can be digitized in a way that we can train a next generation in a one-to-one scenario with AI agents in a way that we never could from the traditional mentoring environment, beca
