Ace! Are tennis avatars a smashing way of exploiting rights restrictions?

With the 2025 Australian Open in full flow, viewers of the tournament's YouTube channel will have noticed a peculiar quirk of the live match streams hosted online.

Instead of seeing the players, they were treated to the sight of overlaid animated avatars mirroring their actions, hitting an oversized tennis ball. From a marketing/fan engagement perspective, this would seem an easy win – utilising available (and ever-developing) AI to introduce a unique way for even the most casual of tennis fans to consume sports and entertainment. Taking a deeper dive into the legal story behind this throws up a number of talking points.

The Australian Open's rightsholder, Tennis Australia, licenses its broadcast rights globally, including currently to Channel Nine in Australia and Eurosport in the UK. Due to the various contractual complexities around broadcasting arrangements, it would appear the tournament is limited in what it can show on the 'World Feed' (the broadcast it licenses to the likes of Nine and Eurosport) when that feed is hosted on its own channels. In this instance, showing the players seems to be out of the question. Image rights issues wouldn't ordinarily be a factor here, as players are licensing a form of their image rights by agreeing to play at these lucrative events.

So is this a glaring contractual oversight on the rightsholder's part, or a carefully conceived way of exploiting a loophole in a tech-dominated sports landscape? Tennis broadcast agreements are often multi-year deals and unlikely to be renewed or commenced at the same time, so it is difficult to pinpoint where the restriction on showcasing the likes of Novak Djokovic arises from, particularly as the YouTube channel is available internationally. 

Where rights issues of any kind crop up, it is often because a rightsholder does not have the right to deal in the IP in question. Here, it is likely that Tennis Australia exclusively licensed the ability to show matches online. By replacing the players with avatars, the tournament could be making the point that, contractually, they aren't actually showing the match but a reproduction of it. Whatever the reason, it is clear a lot of creative thinking has gone into navigating these broadcasting restrictions and, given the time and costs likely involved in developing this novel solution, it would be difficult not to conclude that this is a cleverly planned workaround.

If you would like further information on how to navigate issues around your broadcast or other IP rights, we are happy to assist. Feel free to get in touch to discuss.