A new report from education-technology company Wiingy testing post-ChatGPT predictions against three years of real-world data has identified broadcasting as one of the most disrupted sectors in the U.S. economy, with technical roles posting the steepest real-wage decline and one of the largest workforce contractions of any occupation studied.
For broadcast technicians, the findings are stark - both in terms of headcount and wages. U.S. employment in the category fell from 33,020 positions in 2022 to 21,080 in 2024, a loss of 11,940 jobs and a 36.2% contraction of the workforce in just two years. Real wages for the roles that remained dropped 19.5% after adjusting for inflation, from $60,700 to $53,920, the largest real-wage decline of any occupation in the study.
As AI-based tools for transcription, captioning, automated highlight cutting, voice synthesis, and AI-assisted master control have moved into production workflows, dedicated technical staff have often become less necessary for broadcasters.
The Wiingy analysis revisited automation forecasts from the 2017 Oxford Future of Employment study and the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs report, then measured what has actually happened across 29 skills since ChatGPT's November 2022 launch. Researchers tracked more than 2,000 monthly data points pulled from Google Trends, federal wage and employment records, and job-posting volumes, using the post-ChatGPT window of November 2022 through March 2026 as the test period.
According to the report, broadcasting has not seen the barbell effect visible in other fields. For example, Web developer wages rose 15.7%, beating inflation, even as the industry shed 9,760 jobs, an 11.0% contraction. The pattern, the report argues, reflects AI absorbing routine work more complex, higher-value tasks continue to require human staffing. Broadcasting shows the same workforce contraction but without the wage premium for survivors, suggesting the sector is potentially further along the AI disruption curve.
The Google Trends portion of the study introduces a metric the authors call the Temporal Resilience Score, or TRS, which compares average search interest for a skill after ChatGPT's launch to the period immediately before. A TRS of 1.0 indicates flat demand; values above 1.0 indicate growth, and values below indicate decline.
Within that framework arose a unique nuance when it came to Video Editing. Research found TRS of 2.59, meaning search interest more than doubled after ChatGPT, even as the broadcasting jobs data moved sharply in the opposite direction. This suggests what Wiingy calls the Director Shift in which the workforce is moving from manual transmission to high-level creative supervision of AI tools. This paradox - where search demand for the skill stays high while the traditional job count falls - is a critical trend for sports production professionals to understand. In other words, while the skill itself persists, the job titles attached to it are changing.
That distinction matters for sports broadcasting, where remote and distributed production models, cloud-based master control, and AI-assisted live workflows have advanced quickly over the same period covered by the study. Although Wiingy's data does not break out sports production specifically, the broader broadcast-technician category captures many of the engineering and operations roles that historically populated live-production environments.
Check out the full Wiingy report, which covers all 29 skills tested against the Oxford and WEF predictions.
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A new report from education-technology company Wiingy testing post-ChatGPT predictions against three years of real-world data has identified broadcasting as one of the most disrupted sectors in the U.S. economy, with technical roles posting the steepest real-wage decline and one of the largest workforce contractions of any occupation studied.
