The Australian Open, the first big professional tennis tournament of 2025, is happening right now in Melbourne. But depending on where you live or whether you have access to cable or not, it’s very possible that you can’t easily or freely watch matches. Don’t worry, the Australian Open has a solution and it looks a lot like a video game.
A recent trend in sport broadcasting has been the use of motion capture and AI tech to recreate a live game digitally in real time. We’ve seen Homer Simpson and the rest of his family recently play an NFL game on Disney+. Similarly, the NHL had a match featuring Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes stars. Many times, these gimmicks are just a way to inject some IP into a sports event and maybe bring in new or younger viewers. But, because these oddball broadcasts use digital avatars to recreate the actual sporting event, they do provide people with a real-time way to watch said event without actually showing any footage of it. And that means you don’t have to deal with pesky broadcast rights. That leads us to what’s happening in Australia.
According to tennis reporter Bastien Fachan, that’s why matches of the Australian Open are currently being streamed online in what looks like Wii Sports Tennis. (It’s not actually Wii Sports, to be clear. Just looks like it.)
The Australian Open, which began on January 6, has been broadcasting matches on its YouTube channel using digital, video game-like avatars. These digital recreations aren’t perfect—sometimes the real audio from the match doesn’t sync up, and other times I’ve spotted the virtual athletes breaking in odd ways that remind me of watching people play Kinect.
But when it works—and that’s more often than not—it provides a strange but effective way to watch a tennis match in real time on YouTube regardless of where you live or what network owns the broadcast rights. I’m not entirely sure why all the avatars have such large heads and the balls are so big, perhaps it’s to make it all seem more video-game-y and thus you won’t mind so much when stuff breaks, or maybe it’s just to make it easier to follow.
Either way, I’ve watched more tennis today than I have in a long time, so it also has the added bonus of making some non-tennis fans like me more likely to watch some of the sport.
You can find all the digital matches online here on the Australian Open’s YouTube channel under the “Live” Tab. Enjoy watching digital people play tennis, and make sure to read the comments in which random tennis fans arrive to watch a match and discover this bizarre video game simulation instead.
