Overlay graphics is a big theme in broadcasting, as visitors to NAB and IBC 2025 would attest. It is especially relevant for live sports as the critical genre for retaining viewers in what is sometimes called the post-streaming age. Overlay graphics provide opportunities to keep both ardent fans and casual viewers engaged in live sporting events across the plethora of viewing devices broadcasters now need to serve. These include big screen TVs both at home and in public venues, as well as laptops, tablets, smartphones and gaming consoles.

But applying overlay graphics consistently across this range of screen sizes while catering for different viewer demands is a major challenge. The range of graphics capabilities required is considerable, making it hard to ensure a broadcast quality experience across all the screens.

It is all too easy for the experience to degenerate on the smaller screens, which would impair the brand at a time when broadcasters are seeking to stand out by sustaining their high professional standing among consumers. After all, initiatives such as DVB-I (Interactive) were originally motivated by the desire to replicate linear broadcasting quality and experience over the internet as broadcasters migrate from the former towards the latter.

Reducing Churn

The underlying challenge of integrating ancillary material such as graphics and data into linear broadcasts is hardly new to broadcasters.  It first came around a decade ago with the designation of smartphones as second or companion screens, set up to deliver supplementary content on demand in association with the primary transmission, especially if that was live sport. This had been driven by growing use of smartphones for access to third party sources of information while watching a live sporting event, such as a profile of an emerging member of a team for example. This raised the concern that viewers were being drawn away from the broadcast event, with the risk of churn to an alternative stream or service.

Broadcasters and service providers therefore sought control of the second screen but still found that this was a source of distraction, reducing their overall revenue-generating potential. Viewers would resort to the second screen to avoid watching ads, for example.

This in turn has motivated efforts to converge the second and primary screens with the help of overlay graphics, so that all viewing activity associated with a live broadcast is in one place. The broadcaster then retains closer control over the experience, while still allowing viewers freedom to explore alternative views and obtain information on demand.

The experience is then supposedly more harmonious visually, without switching the eyes constantly between first and second screens. The viewing may still occur on a smartphone, but ancillary content is still integrated on that screen.

Extended Reality Strategies

Meanwhile, AI and Extended Reality (XR) have also entered the equation to enrich ancillary content and also automate some of the interaction and personalization, admittedly at the cost of further complexity. Under the banner of XR come VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality), with the latter featuring more prominently at this stage.

While VR simulates new experiences, AR is confined to enhancing existing ones.  VR in principle could generate a video of a proposed building upon submission of architects’ drawings, while AR would merely add details to an existing building, and as such is somewhat easier to implement.

As a result, there is little genuine VR in video services, but there is growing deployment of AR. The two blur together when it comes to generating “what if” scenarios from existing sports footage, for example simulating what might have happened if an earlier event had not occurred or played out differently. Such capabilities, nominally still under the banner of AR, are already being evaluated for training and injury recovery, both for individual and team sports. 

It allows individual athletes to observe their movements and improve them through feedback from AR glasses or even smart mirrors, allied to analysis that may be AI based. For team sports it is becoming possible to simulate movements, while providing practice in cognitive skills and visual awareness.

Such capabilities could also enhance viewing experiences but are more complex to integrate with live broadcasts. For now, therefore, AR in broadcasting is largely restricted to application of more sophisticated graphical overlays.

There is one area where AR is more directly involved in new revenue generation and that is in virtual merchandizing. Fans can try on sports gear such as shirts and jerseys online with potential for direct sales, as well as enhancing engagement.

Streamers Leading The Way

So far, the major streaming platforms have been leading the way with AR-enhanced services. Amazon Prime Video introduced AI-enhanced AR graphics in September 2025, early in the current football season, featuring various overlays such as player names, running speeds and jump heights, as well as instant calculations such as the probability a given shot on its way to the target will end up as a goal because the goalkeeper fails to save it. There is also a momentum bar indicating the relative likelihoods of each team scoring next, with an obvious potential application to in-game betting.

All the major sports streaming platforms are investigating various applications under the banner of XR, such as DAZN, Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Disney’s ESPN+ and NBC Sports, as are major leagues or sports bodies themselves, such as FIFA, the NFL and the NBA. Some of these have already announced inside-stadium experiences exploiting 3D and 180-degree enhanced live video feeds, combined with surround sound in the case of big screen viewing.

Adopting Real Time Data

For broadcasters struggling with more limited budgets the priorities have to be decided, aiming to establish foundational graphics capabilities upon which to build selective more advanced features. The challenge really begins with real time data collection and assimilation, and aiming to assemble and structure it appropriately for instant real time analysis.

Such data ranges from the game clock and basic score, to statistics on possession, tackles made, space covered, and other information used to calculate probabilities of various outcomes. This feeds into a complex data pipeline serving the various overlays and applications involved, in some cases on demand by the viewer.

There are also video capabilities, such as alternative camera angles, and in some cases the ongoing creation of instant replays covering specific moments such as a goal and its build up.

Various visuals available for overlay must be created in near real time and paired with live feeds for integration and play out. This requires advanced hardware capabilities, whether in-house or in the cloud, such as video switchers to combine camera feeds with graphical overlays.

There are plenty of tools and services available to assist, from both longstanding broadcast equipment or technology vendors and new players. Yet this still leaves a lot of complexity, both to identify a coherent longer-term strategy and deploy capabilities, while ensuring there is adequate in-built resilience and redundancy to maintain the higher expected levels of availability.

In essence the end-to-end workflow has to be augmented with steps involved in the data capture, processing, analysis, and integration entailed in graphical overlays, personalization and interactivity, under which transmission is increasingly granular and targeted. This workflow can be automated and will also be capable of generating new revenues, such as extending the scope of ad targeting to a live context as well as to the traits of individual viewers.

There is also scope for automation driven by AI to identify moments within a game for replay and association with targeted ads, or on the supply side on-screen sponsorship. This will expand the effective inventory available for advertisers and brands but requires additional loops in the workflow.

A Tailored Approach

The choice of technologies and products for broadcasters depends to some extent on the sports being covered. Some of the available packages include bespoke templates for specific sports, and not just the major ones such as Association and American football. There are also templates for cricket, volleyball, and also esports, highlighting perhaps the growing overlap between the real and virtual worlds.

These include integrated animation tools for fades and wipes to transition smoothly between scenes and characters, the sort of capabilities embodied in Adobe After Effects, for example.

These templates also support graphic features oriented towards particular sports, such as those overlays for alerts like a possible impending goal. They can certainly make it easier to deploy the desired graphical overlays and other features, even if some of them are still work in progress at this stage and could benefit from further tweaks or enhancements.

One overriding issue is being locked in to chosen systems, given that they are all proprietary at present, with a lack of standards in the field. It means a given vendor’s offering becomes the central graphics controller for at least the streams associated with a given sport. The problem is worsened by the need to serve such a diverse range of devices.

This issue has been taken up by some representative broadcasting bodies in the field, most notably the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with its OGraf project set up to create an open specification for delivery and rendering of graphics across diverse platforms. The EBU argues that “current graphics systems are often closed, end-to-end solutions tied to specific vendors, making integration and flexibility difficult. This creates significant roadblocks for media organizations aiming to deliver consistent graphics experiences across diverse platforms.”

This OGraf initiative is being driven by the EBU’s HTML Graphics group and is focused on a modular approach to video graphics that can be readily integrated into existing systems. The goal is to step away from the current generation of all-in-one packages that rely on proprietary formats and lock broadcasters into systems that may become obsolete or fail to cater for all their needs.

Instead, the idea is to allow graphics to be created once and then rendered automatically across all digital platforms and web streams, while being supported by video editing tools. The modular structure is designed to enable individual components to be upgraded or replaced in isolation without affecting the rest of the workflow.

As always, this initiative’s success depends on the industry rallying around the standard. It is based on the unified and widely supported HTML standards, but then so loosely are most if not all of those proprietary packages. It is early days given the initiative was only really floated in April 2025, but it does seem to be gaining momentum as it addresses a pressing need for broadcasters.