By: Dakota Guy
The pitch crosses the plate. Before the umpire can raise his fist, a challenge is called. Seconds later, the scoreboard overrules the call. Not by a human, but by a machine.
It is a moment that would have seemed impossible 20 years ago. But today, technology is reshaping sports in ways that go far beyond who calls a strike.
From the way games are filmed to how signals travel across a college campus, the tools behind sports are changing fast. At Georgia Southern University, the people closest to those tools say there is no slowing down.
Joshua Farara is a computer programming lecturer at Georgia Southern. He has watched technology reshape his field year after year. He said the biggest shift has been artificial intelligence and how it has changed the way people solve problems.
"Before you had to look up different various issues online," Farara said. "Having those immediate answers has definitely made people more productive."
Farara said the changes go far beyond writing code. He sees technology's impact on nearly every industry, including sports.
He pointed to cameras as one of the clearest examples. What fans can see and experience at a game today looks nothing like it did a decade ago.
"Before you had to be there or you watched a sport on TV," Farara said. "But now you have drones at a football game. You can pretty much be on the field from a drone's perspective."
Wearable technology is also changing how teams keep track of their athletes. Farara said sensors in devices worn by players likely track movement and physical activity during games. He said those readings could flag anything outside a normal range for medical staff to review.
That kind of precision is exactly what the Automated Ball-Strike system, known as ABS, brings to baseball. The system uses tracking technology to determine whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. It gives players the ability to challenge an umpire's call on the spot.
A 2025 study published in the journal Applied Sciences found that an AI-based sports broadcasting system could analyze games in real time and generate automated commentary. The system reached 92.5% accuracy in tracking players and objects on the field.
Farara said he is not worried about that level of precision going too far. He thinks people will adjust.
"I think the new normal will be more specific and more measurable," Farara said. "As humans, we're gonna adapt."
Still, he believes there is something technology will never replace. The feeling of watching two people compete is something a machine cannot recreate.
"You're not gonna watch a chess match of two AIs competing," Farara said. "It's knowing that someone else is critically thinking about a problem and competing in that fashion."
That human element is something Benjamin Powell thinks about a lot. Powell is the assistant director at GATA Productions, Georgia Southern's in-house sports broadcasting unit. He has worked there since he was a student in 2015.
Powell said the way a modern broadcast works has changed completely since he started. For years, every signal ran through physical cables. Today, more and more of it travels over internet-based networks.
"Everything's more IP and cloud-based now," Powell said. "In the past, you would have to run a cable for essentially everything."
GATA still relies on fiber optic cable for most of its setup. Fiber optic cables carry signals using pulses of light. Powell said those cables stretch across the entire Georgia Southern campus, pulling video feeds from baseball and softball venues all the way back to the main control room.
"That's how we get all of our signals from all of our cameras all the way over from baseball and softball," Powell said. "We have them ran through fiber all the way here into our patch panel."
Newer systems go even further. Some equipment now sends audio and video over standard network connections with no dedicated cable required. It costs more upfront, Powell said, but it is far easier to manage once it is running.
"It's more expensive, but easier to get something set up nowadays," Powell said.
That shift is happening across the entire broadcast industry. According to LTN Global, a media distribution company, IP technology now allows a single operator to manage 20 channels at once. That would have been impossible with older cable-based systems.
Camera and audio quality have followed the same path. Powell said some cameras at GATA today are the same ones used when he was a student. Replacing cameras is expensive. But the industry overall has moved toward 4K resolution and microphone systems that can cover an entire arena from just a handful of fixed points.
"You can do more with less," Powell said. "The load has gotten smaller."
On ABS specifically, Powell shares some of Farara's optimism but not all of it. He worries that as the technology gets more precise, the calls will get harder to accept.
"It seems to be more accurate than a lot of ump calls," Powell said. "But what I'm worried about is we're going to get to the point where we're just splitting hairs."
A pitch could land a fraction of an inch outside the zone and still get called a ball. A human umpire would never spot a difference that small. But a machine would call it every time.
"At that point, it was that far out, just call it a ball," Powell said.
Georgia Southern students have already started building their own version of similar tracking technology. Powell described a system called PitchStream, created in-house, that pulls data from Trackman. Trackman is a radar-based pitch tracking tool. The system converts that data into live graphics shown during broadcasts.
AI helped students write the code for it. Powell said that kind of help has made it possible for small operations like GATA to build tools they could not otherwise afford.
"It helps take a lot of the legwork out of the actual coding process," Powell said. "If you can't get it, you can build it."
Farara said that reflects a bigger change in what everyday people can now build with the help of technology.
"If you ever had an idea, like, I just want to play this game but it doesn't exist yet, you don't have to be a professional to get started," Farara said. "It kind of lowers the barriers to entry."
Dorian Redding sees that same pattern in his own work. Redding is an IT student intern at Georgia Southern who specializes in business automation. He recently finished a project that replaced a client's entire paper-based approval system with a digital platform. The platform stores data in a dashboard the client can check at any time.
"If there's an easy way to do something, people are going to go the easier route," Redding said.
But Redding said that convenience comes at a cost. The more technology handles, the less people are forced to think through problems on their own.
"We are losing that aspect of the brain that we did use, put some thought and effort and energy into doing basic tasks," Redding said.
In sports marketing, Redding has seen the same wave of technology change the fan experience. He pointed to the video board at Georgia Southern athletic events as one of the most visible examples. He also noted new color-changing lights installed at Hanner Fieldhouse.
"That's a new addition that they added," Redding said. "Some new formality that they incorporated over the years."
Redding said he believes AI does more good than harm as long as people use it the right way.
"If you know how to use AI, you can really regulate it to where there really would be no negatives," Redding said. "That's just my opinion."
Powell sees it the same way. Cameras can now be set to track players automatically. Signals travel faster and farther than ever before. Audio gear does more with less equipment.
But none of that changes what makes a broadcast worth watching, he said.
"You can't really program it to be cinematic," Powell said. "It still needs that human touch to it."
References
Applied Sciences, "Integrated AI System for Real-Time Sports Broadcasting: Player Behavior, Game Event Recognition, and Generative AI Commentary in Basketball Games." Published Feb. 3, 2025. MDPI. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/3/1543
LTN Global, "Why Live Sports Broadcasting Needs Innovation." Published June 6, 2024. https://ltnglobal.com/blog/why-live-sports-broadcasting-needs-innovation