The Australian Open’s animated tennis players: A YouTube sensation and the future of sports media

MELBOURNE, Australia – At one point, they were playing tennis. The next day, they disappear from the field, melt into a puddle, or do a backflip in the middle of the field. Their rackets fly independently of their hands, and sometimes disappear altogether. Their heads are large. They are the best tennis players in the world; They are the undisputed stars of 2025 Australian Open.

It’s also an animation.

there Daniil Medvedevwho reached last year’s finals, slams his racket into the net.

There’s Madison Keys, this year’s semi-finalist, running onto the ball before leaping into the air and disappearing, causing Elena Gabriella Ros to miss a shot.

And there’s Jack Draper, who feels the effects of five straight three-set matches and melts on the court.

These clips are brought to you by AO Animated, an Australian Open live YouTube streamer offering a video game-style broadcast of matches played on Melbourne Park’s three exhibition courts: Rod Laver Arena, Margaret Court Arena and John Cain Arena. It uses tracking data from the Falcon Eye system used for Electronic Linear Communication (ELC) to map players’ movement and the path of the ball, before overlaying surfaces – facial features, kits, and rackets – that turns that data into a cartoon player.

This means that as fun as the bugs are, the feed is an exact replica of live tennis, only on a short delay. There are real commentary, crowd noise and chair umpire calls, along with bobble-headed characters who bear only a passing resemblance to the players they represent. In a throwback to old computer games, heroes sometimes have minds of their own.

The tournament was tried out in a primitive version in 2023, where there are no players and the ball is only traced back and forth. In 2024, there was only one court animation, but this year, there are three and the viral moments have captured the imagination of the tennis world. Viewership rose from 246,542 in the first six days of last year’s event to 1,796,338 in the same time frame this year.

The cartoon players, who tended to misplace limbs, lose rackets, and sometimes swap places on the court, were well received by their real-world counterparts.

“It’s funny,” Carlos Alcaraz said in a press conference last Wednesday. World No. 30 Leila Fernandez was scouting a competitor on YouTube and clicked on one of the streams thinking it would be useful before she got a pleasant but strange surprise.

Then Daria Kasatkina, the Russian world No. 10 who runs a YouTube vlog, explains why this seemingly bizarre bit of fun is also a harbinger of the future of tennis media, as well as the growth of the sport. There’s no subscription to pay, no ticket and travel to purchase, and no need to trawl through a series of TV rights and providers to figure out which broadcaster will host the tournament in the place a budding tennis fan might call home.

“It’s free,” Kasatkina said at a press conference.

The economics of Grand Slam media rights – deciding which channels show the world’s four biggest tennis events – are relatively straightforward. The Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open sell their media rights to broadcasters. Historically, television networks have built their portfolios on the strength of cable television. Some (including ESPN, Warner Bros Discovery, and, most recently, Tennis Channel) also have direct-to-consumer streaming.

ESPN will pay $2.04bn (more than £1.5bn) to broadcast the US Open until 2037, while a Wimbledon broadcast deal is with ABC and ESPN. Come At $52.5 million annually, according to SP Global. Warner Bros Discovery has a 10-year, $650 million contract to broadcast the French Open in the United States starting in 2025.

Major Slams Leagues must also protect the value of their personal experience. If fans could watch a major tournament with relative ease from anywhere, the value of having a physical ticket would be less. As a result, these streaming deals come with strict restrictions on sharing, editing and uploading clips to sites like YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram – the places where most people will have the greatest opportunity to discover tennis.

These restrictions extend to the major leagues themselves, which are giving up a degree of control over how they promote themselves on social media. Because AO Animated is generated by ELC tracking data and not broadcast feeds from TV cameras, it can be broadcast live alongside the real match, broadcasting a free tennis broadcast just two minutes after the real event. Rather than be bothered with AO Animated potentially drawing attention away from its live footage, Eurosport and beIN Sports are hosting it on their online platforms.

“We knew we were sitting on this asset, the ELC, and it started with that,” Machar Reed, Tennis Australia’s director of innovation, said in an interview at Melbourne Park this week.

“We use it to get skeletal data, with 29 points on the skeleton. This is tracked 50 times a second by 12 cameras. This allows you to create a 3D mesh and then place the skin on top of it. There are almost an infinite number of avatars that You can have it.

“There’s something about it, building a community that allows people to chat about what happened and connect with the sport differently.”

Community chat is a staple of YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and other streaming platforms, which tennis has been slow to embrace. the NBA, NFL and NHL We used this version of the sports broadcast: In December, Disney+ is streaming the NFL game between the Dallas Cowboys and Cincinnati Bengals as The Simpsons on Monday Night Football.. He complements Formula One drivers Who stream on Twitchworld-famous football players Who love eSportsAnd athletes Who use TikTok.

Combined, these platforms and free ways to play tennis expand fans’ discovery of the sport. They might go from being a fan of Coco Gauff the TikToker to Coco Gauff the tennis player to the sport of tennis. Or they might watch a funny clip of a cartoon version of an elite athlete melting onto the floor and wonder what on earth is going on.

These characters are drawn by Australian tennis player Mark Ready, who works on content for the Australian Open games.

Reddy works in a bunker surrounded by computer screens and feeds of all the matches are turned into animation. Reddy designed the graphics, players and stadiums. He regularly enters YouTube chat to engage viewers with questions and answer some of their queries. He likes to keep it fun, embracing the kinks that captured the imagination.

Mark Ready in the animation room at Melbourne Park. (tennis australia)

As he sits in the dugout during Emma Raducanu’s third-round match against Iga Swiatek, he says The athlete The idea first came to him because he thought a version of tennis would appeal to fans without a practical path to broadcast footage. The tournament has the right to conduct pre- and post-match, so when the warm-up is over and the player goes to the service line to start the match, the footage dissolves into the world of animation. It’s like a reverse Wizard of Oz movie, where halfway through the movie it switches from black and white to gorgeous technicolor.

This also means that there is no way to verify that everything is working up to the point, creating another layer of risk. This includes the main characters with their big heads, huge tennis balls, and flying rackets.

But part of AO Animated’s success is that its creators don’t care much about it. They want it to be fun and attractive first and foremost, like the appearance of the players – which, with their large heads, is hardly realistic.

“It’s definitely intentional,” says Xavier Muehlebach, head of original content for the tournament.

“We wanted something that was cute and kid-friendly, but not exclusive to kids. I could sit back and have fun and laugh and watch that and not feel like I’m stuck in a loop of watching Blue’s Clues or something.”

“It’s fun to take a cartoon look at it,” Reddy adds. “There’s the real version if you want accuracy.”

“We might get a scenario where we have appropriate models for each player, but for now, it’s like a character editor in a video game. You just open it up and you can change the shape of the head, the eyes, everything. It was about creating a modifiable character, and at the moment There are enough hairstyles, hats and different things.

The next day, he sent an animated version of the AO to this correspondent, who was suffering against Alcaraz.

There are other challenges that make the trend move towards surrealism. The ELC cameras are mainly located behind the players, so when they crouch, the racket can disappear – a challenge to track due to the speed at which it moves. There are no finger animations (on Reddy’s wish list for next year) and the cameras stop tracking players about six meters behind the baseline, or if they crouch down. This explains Draper’s apparent meltdown in court against Alcaraz.

Reddy takes the lead in the comments by making fun of any misfortune. “That’s a big draw card. Just bringing this up without chatting, I don’t know if it would have the same response,” he says.

“It will be very different and negative, whereas this is more community based and they are actually talking about tennis but also about technology,” Muehlebach adds.

The race for future-proof tennis due to the continuing decline in cable TV revenues, which will eventually begin to impact the value of broadcast rights, has also created something of a media arms race between the major corporations. The French Open introduced head cameras for judges last year, which were intended to check line calls but instead became notorious for making players look like little children.

Tennis Australia has established its first venture capital fund, A$30m (£15.2m; $18.6m) AO Ventures, which it says will “provide early support to high-growth technology-led startups innovating in the worlds of sport”. Entertainment, media and health.”

Developing AO Animated is another goal, with the desire to add “emotion tracking” so players can both celebrate and despair. There are plans to animate the entire complex, as well as adding commentators who will add color not to the actual tennis game being animated, but to the quirks of the animation itself.

As much as the most important figures in this initiative are the tournament and the fans, as with tennis, it is the players who create value and attract fans. The animated tennis game is only as good as the tennis game being played. World number one Aryna Sabalenka was jokingly not impressed with her figure, as she shared a clip on Instagram.

“We are with them and are asking for their feedback,” Muehlebach said. “Others might be a little more reserved because they were working on a video game of their own.” Sponsorship changes may also have an impact in the future, as players do not often sign new deals or, as often, change their racket or clothing sponsor.

It’s unlikely that every Grand Slam, let alone every tournament, will be filled with animated versions of Alcaraz and Swiatek strutting around the court between points and occasionally flipping into the stands soon. However, AO Animated is one of the clearest signs yet that tennis understands how sports media is changing and that falling behind can quickly become a death sentence.

One day, these animated tennis characters may rule the world. Until then, there is always Daniil Medvedev and his disappearing racket.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb L The athlete)