AI Eliminated 12,000 Broadcast Jobs in Two Years - What This Means for Sports Media Careers

A new report published this week found that US broadcast technician roles fell 36.2% in just two years. Real wages for the roles that survived dropped 19.5%. This is the current state of the industry and it has direct implications for every aspiring sports media professional

What Is Actually Being Replaced?

The distinction matters. AI is not replacing sports media. It is replacing specific, repetitive, technically defined tasks within sports media. Understanding which ones tells you a great deal about where the risk sits and where it does not.

AI-based tools for transcription, captioning, automated highlight cutting, voice synthesis, and AI-assisted master control are the specific technologies driving this contraction. The Bundesliga tested live multi-language AI commentary in 2024. IBM’s AI system at Wimbledon 2023 generated highlight commentary using computer vision that recognised aces and break points.

AI platforms like Harmonic’s VOS360 create real-time highlight reels without human editorial input. AI systems can now calibrate broadcast courts with 97% accuracy and detect players and objects with 92.5% accuracy.

By early 2025, about 25% of broadcasters were already using AI tools, up from just 9% in 2024. The adoption curve is steep.

What is being replaced is the lower-skilled, task-defined end of the broadcast technician role: the operator who clips a highlight package to a standard template, the technician who manages captioning from a feed, the overnight master control operator who monitors a broadcast with minimal editorial input. These roles had been entry points into the broadcast industry for decades. They are disappearing at pace.

What is not being replaced, or not at anything like the same speed, is the editorial judgment, the creative direction, the storytelling, the source relationships, the live decision-making under pressure, the personality and voice that audiences follow.

Sports broadcaster Troy Santiago discovered this year that his Spanish-language commentary for Power Slap had been replaced by AI. Santiago, an experienced host who has covered multiple sports, initially took the news calmly, until he watched a new Spanish broadcast and realised he and his broadcast partner had been replaced by technology.

His case illustrates both the threat and the lesson: AI replaced a routine, scalable commentary product. It has not replaced the credibility, the relationship, and the cultural authority of a trusted sports voice.

Where the Jobs Are Still Growing

The employment picture in sports media is not uniformly bleak. It is contracting sharply in technical roles that can be automated, and expanding actively in roles that cannot.

The fastest-growing demand in sports media right now sits in digital content strategy, social media management, creator economy roles, data journalism, and the communications infrastructure being built around the expansion of women’s sport, streaming rights, and league-owned media operations.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that while 92 million roles are projected to be displaced globally by 2030, 170 million new roles will emerge — a net gain of 78 million jobs.

The restructuring is real. The replacement of human work by automation is real. But the conclusion is not that there are fewer jobs. It is that different jobs are growing, and the workers who understand which ones and build accordingly will be significantly better positioned than those who do not.

In sports media specifically, the roles least exposed to AI automation share a common characteristic: they require human judgment, relationships, personality, or physical presence in environments that are too variable for AI to manage.

The journalist building source relationships with non-league clubs. The social media manager making real-time editorial decisions during a live match. The communications professional managing a crisis response at 11pm. The content creator whose audience follows their specific voice across platforms. These are not roles that AI can replicate in any meaningful timeframe.

While AI systems streamline production and create new technical roles, they also contribute to the consolidation or elimination of traditional jobs, particularly at the entry level. The entry-level jobs disappearing are the technical ones. The entry-level opportunities growing are in digital content, social media, and the creator economy — precisely the areas where the barrier to building a public track record has never been lower.

Workers with AI skills now earn wages approximately 25% higher than those without equivalent expertise, according to 2025 labour market data. The AI in sports market is valued at $1.2 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $4.7 billion by 2034.

Understanding how these tools work — being able to direct them, assess their output, and integrate them into professional workflows — is becoming one of the most valuable skills in sports media production, not a threat to employment.

What This Means for Your Career: Five Specific Actions

The data does not call for panic. It calls for specific, deliberate decisions about which skills to develop, which roles to pursue, and how to position a sports media career to sit on the right side of the bifurcation that is already underway.

Build a public track record from day one

The roles growing fastest in sports media (content creation, digital journalism, social media, podcasting) all have one thing in common: a public body of work is the primary credential. No algorithm decides whether to commission your newsletter or follow your podcast. The audience does.

Start building that track record immediately, in whatever niche you can serve with genuine depth and consistency. The technical entry-level roles that used to require you to spend years in a gallery before anyone noticed your work are contracting. The creative and editorial roles that reward a demonstrated public voice are expanding.

Learn to use AI tools, not avoid them

The broadcast professionals who will thrive over the next five years are not the ones who resist AI. They are the ones who understand how to direct it, quality-check its output, integrate it into their workflows, and deliver results faster and at higher volume as a result.

If you are in production, learn the AI tools that are reshaping your workflow; automated highlight generation, AI-assisted editing, voice synthesis applications. Being the person in a production team who understands both the editorial and the AI dimensions of a role is a significant competitive advantage.

Develop skills that sit above automation

Editorial judgment, source development, investigative reporting, live commentary, brand voice, crisis communications, community management — these are the skills that sit above what AI can currently replicate. Every sports media career should be building in these directions deliberately and continuously.

The technician who was also a strong writer or an on-air personality had options when their technical role was automated. The technician who only had the technical skills did not.

Target the growth areas

The fastest expanding employment in sports media right now runs through women’s sport (broadcast revenues growing at 25% annually, rights deals multiplying), the creator economy (league and club content operations expanding to serve audiences that traditional broadcast cannot reach), sports data and analytics (every major rights holder and club building intelligence operations), and communications infrastructure across leagues, federations, and the brands investing in sport.

These are not marginal niches. They are the structural growth areas of the industry. Build your career toward them deliberately.

Treat independent work as strategic positioning

The broadcast technician roles being automated were institutional; they required a staff position at a broadcaster to access. The roles growing fastest are increasingly accessible without institutional affiliation.

A newsletter covering a specific sports niche, a podcast building a loyal community, a social media account that demonstrates platform expertise and sports knowledge, a portfolio of strong editorial work, these are not just passion projects.

They are positioning decisions that place you in the growing sector of the industry rather than the contracting one. Build the independent track record that makes you visible and employable in the roles that are actually expanding.

The Honest Picture

The SVG report is not a reason to abandon ambitions in sports media. It is a reason to be more specific about which ambitions to pursue and how.

The 11,940 broadcast technician jobs lost between 2022 and 2024 were predominantly at the task-defined, technically routine end of the production spectrum. They were the roles most susceptible to automation, and the roles that AI has now automated.

The jobs at the creative, editorial, relational, and strategic end of sports media are not contracting at comparable rates. In many areas they are growing.

The sports media professional who builds a career on editorial judgment, storytelling, audience relationships, and the ability to direct AI tools rather than be replaced by them will find more opportunity in the current market than at any previous point in the industry’s history.

The one who builds their career exclusively on technically defined broadcast skills that can be replicated by software will find the market increasingly difficult. That is not a comfortable message. But it’s an honest one, and acting on it is considerably more useful than ignoring it.

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