Tennis fans looking to watch the 2025 Australian Open via the official livestream will come across a change that might have them worrying about their sanity.
As you can check right now on the tournament’s official YouTube channel, the players you know to be human have been replaced by animated overlays of models resembling those seen onWii Sports.
Hilariously, even the real ball has been replaced by the overlay of a CGI ball, you know, maybe to avoid making ittoo jarring.
It turns out this happens because the Australian Open somehow doesn’t own all of its own broadcasting rights, so it has resorted to showing you real-time Wii-fied versions of the players on YouTube to appease the copyright gods. It’s the beautifully hilarious video game adaptation you didn’t know you wanted.
As explained byThe Guardianin an interview with Machar Reid, the director of innovation at the Australian Open, we’re looking at some really impressive but still-evolving technology.
“Limb tracking is complex, you’ve got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton,” Reid said, “It’s not as seamless as it could be – we don’t have fingers – but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes.”
If you’re a sports fan, you might’ve already tried to use YouTube to watch a game, only to find out you’d been lured into watching a dumbFIFA/EA Sports FCreplay pretending to be the real thing.Not too long ago, a streamer made the news for streaming a realUFCpay-per-view fight on Twitch, where he bypassed the copyright police by using a controller to pretend he was just playing aUFCgame.
It’s hilarious to see even huge organizations having to resort to similar trickery to get to livestream in a semi-proper way.
This new broadcasting system is but one of many new ideas implemented by the Australian Open Committee. Another idea was the implementation of NFTs, which it has sincebeen wise enough to abandon.
Despite the inevitable jank that will always come with highly experimental tech — sometimes the CGI feet aren’t perfectly synchronized with the player’s real feet, for example — I’d take this hilarious move over not being able to watch a game any day. Here’s hoping they continue to invest in this tech so that the Australian Open 2026 featuresTop Spin 2K25–level graphics.
