Why is the Australian Open 2025 streamed on YouTube with Nintendo Wii Sports game-styled players on court? | Tennis News

If you are catching second seed Alexander Zverev’s second round match against Spain’s Pedro Martinez on Wednesday in the Australian Open’s official YouTube channel, you will be in for a mind-spinning surprise.
Everything streamed is produced real-time. The points, the shots and the elementary moments are all happening out there in Melbourne Park in real timwe. Except for the players, who have been animated and looks straight out of a video-game comsole, and the tennis ball which might share a closer resemblance to a fluorescent yellow football.
In a unique workaround to address geographical streaming constraints and copyrights issues, the Australian Open organizers have modified players to animation, enabling viewers to free access, albeit at the cost of seeing their favourite stars in their exact physical form!
The organisers have built on the recent broadcasting trend where motion capture and AI technologies have merged to recreate real-time sporting events on a digital platform. The innovative characters in the stream have been appeared to be inspired from Japanese video game company Nintendo’s Wii console and its simulation video game Wii Sports that was released in 2006.

I had to triple check this was real. It is.
The Australian Open on YouTube, due to rights issues, are getting around them replacing real players with Nintendo Wii Sports Tennis characters. I think I love this.
pic.twitter.com/SAlxBgDsht
— Sid Seixeiro (@Sid_Seixeiro) January 14, 2025
According to tennis reporter Bastien Fachan, “the Australian Open don’t own all of their broadcasting rights (fairly common), so they’re live-streaming a Wii Tennis-like version of the matches on YouTube.”
The animated avatars are fun but not without a share of glitches, imperfections and lags on the stream. “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,” observed Kansas-based gaming reporter Zack Ziewen on video game website, Kotaku.
When a fan on the YouTube stream of the Zverev-Martinez quizzed about the time taken to build the technology, the Australian Open TV replied: “Not a lot of time to test as it’s new tech again this year. We’ve done this for the last two years (year one no skeletons, just a dot with xy coords like pong).”

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