The conversation also covered how AI is being leveraged as a tool for data aggregation while allowing researchers to focus more on storytelling and context. Digital platforms and social media have democratized sports fandom, creating new pathways for fan engagement beyond traditional TV viewership.
A Shifting Sports Media Landscape
All Things Insights: We have the pleasure today of being with Benjamin Smith, Manager, Live Sports & Forecasting, ESPN. Thank you so much for talking with us a little bit about all things insights.
Benjamin Smith: Appreciate you having me.
All Things Insights: With the Media Insights & Engagement Conference coming up, we are focusing on some of the trends happening in the media insights industry, whether that’s media, entertainment, sports. We wanted to touch base on the sports channel in particular. The sports media landscape is evolving just like the media and entertainment space. Just how are you leveraging research and insights to stay ahead of the game?
Benjamin Smith: Research and insights really drive everything that my team does. My corner of ESPN research is called live sports and forecasting. We are very focused on not just game audiences, but demographic trends.
Whether it’s the sort of perpetually shifting TV streaming landscape, popularity trends within teams or players or leagues, or, again, even just those demographic trends in viewership and fandom, we’re really engaged with all of it. There’s so much data out there. We’re just trying to wrap our arms around as much as we can and gain the biggest takeaways, bring them all together, and provide our viewpoint to the business units that we work with at ESPN. We try to be as innovative and as state of the art as we can.
We evolve our research in the same ways that the sports media landscape evolves as well. No request or project is ever going to be the same. We’ll take a different strategy or angle to something depending on who’s asking and what they need. But research and insights drive I’d say just about everything that my team does in our roles here.
Finding Value with AI Tools
All Things Insights: Speaking of innovation and being state of the art, how would you say AI comes into play with your position as far as adapting to these technologies?
Benjamin Smith: Like I’m sure many of our peers across the industry, we are trying to learn the best practices and the best ways forward with AI. It’s certainly about as buzzy a word and as a topic as you can have to start 2026. There’s a lot of use cases for these sorts of emerging technologies, not just AI, but machine learning and large language models and all that comes along with that.
But personally, for me, we’ve found a lot of success with new tech tools. There’s just so much data we have to try to get our hands around as researchers in a given day. AI has really helped us, just make more efficient processes in being able to aggregate the data, and get what we need from it. Obviously, we’re training the AI in the same way that it trains us back in terms of prompt engineering and working on how we can make the tools work for us most efficiently. We can think of them as very highly developed interns, but you still need to teach an intern.
Saving the time on that nuts-and-bolts data aggregation and collection, it allows us to devote more time to build in the context and the storytelling that as researchers we take a lot of pride in. Plenty of people can just sort of see a table and read numbers and read percentages, but, it’s really on us to make that data story come to life. I think we’ve been able to spend a little more time on being curious and telling a story rather than just focusing on a spreadsheet. That’s where we find the most value on my team. But very broadly, the Walt Disney Company has embraced these emerging technologies as well. We’re always working within those same bigger company guidelines to make sure we’re using it not just responsibly, but efficiently. We’re learning along with everyone else. Right now, we’re really just trying as much as we can and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
Democratizing Sports Fandom
All Things Insights: Let’s drill down a little bit into more specific trends about the sports channel in particular. There has been major growth in sports communities and fandom. Do you think digital platforms have changed the way sports have been consumed?
Benjamin Smith: Social media and short form video means that there are now millions of sports fans whose front door to the sport is not TV, but their phone in the same way when I grew up. I was the kid that got up an hour before school to watch the overnight sports center and catch up on everything. My kids don’t yet have phones, but when they do, I imagine that’s how they’re going to primarily engage with sports. Twenty years ago, it was probably really hard to say that you were a sports fan if you didn’t watch games or if you didn’t watch studio shows, but that’s not the case in 2026.
I think that the emergence and proliferation of all the different platforms that you can consume content broadly on, it’s really democratized sports fandom. Ultimately, we want as many people coming into the tent as possible. If they’re going to watch a game and watch our studio programming, that’s great. But we also know that if your primary way of engaging with sports is ESPN on Instagram or TikTok, that’s cool too. You’re a fan.
Not just recently, but if you go back five, ten years, we’ve always tried to be on the front line of not just optimizing content we already have for those platforms, but also creating bespoke content for the fans who are going to engage there. Because the same content that’s going to appeal to me as a 39-year old male are not going to apply to a teenager who’s going through high school. These are enhancements to our core product, and that core product is still live sports.
You might not be the fan who’s engaging in any content with that, but the reason it’s sort of on your radar is because that sports exist, and that’s how the players and the teams develop their followings and their fandom. We think that it’s great that you have people that are going to engage in this content and engage in sports, even if they aren’t sitting down and watching TV the same way that you or I might.
Connecting to the Viewer
All Things Insights: Great viewpoint. There’s such a demand for personalized content, on-demand experiences, streaming, all of these shifting consumer trends. This relates to the connected viewer consuming sports content across all kinds of different devices and platforms. How does ESPN adapt to those kinds of needs?
Benjamin Smith: On the personalization side, everyone has their algorithm that you open up your various apps and you’re getting served what you want. That’s not a new or novel concept to ESPN. Again, I’ll tie it back to me. I can remember when I got my first family computer, and I could go on ESPN.com, and I could select the teams, the players, the leagues that I was interested in. And then I would get, as a long-suffering New York Giants fan, the Giants top score which would be the first one that pops up in the little ticker at the top of the website. Same thing with players I was interested in. News stories would surface for them first. The company has only improved since then.
We still have that incredible range and suite of personalization. There’s not really a league or a team that exists that you can’t select a favorite on. You like some third tier English soccer team? You could probably put them as a favorite, and you’ll get whatever we have on that.
But also, yes, more broadly, last August, we had a huge relaunch of the ESPN app, and we rolled out some cool enhancements there. One of them is the Sports Center for you where it takes all of those personalization options that you have, and you get a bespoke highlight package of some things you might be interested in. On the personalization side, that’s a pretty good representation of what we do as a company.
As for the connected viewer when we launched the ESPN app and relaunched it in August, we have new services and new enhancements there too. You look at something like StreamCenter, which is really a dedicated second screen viewing opportunity. If I’m into stats, I have a good appreciation for looking at a box score. If I’m watching the game on my TV, on my phone or my iPad, you I can follow along in more of a stats driven way that otherwise I’d have to be manually poking into the app and in the box score.
Things like that are really cool, in terms of how we talk about the connected viewer. Regarding my Giants fandom, I like being able to pull up a GameCast and see not just how my team is doing but whatever players that are going up against the Giants that day that I happen to have in fantasy, it’s kind of an all-in-one spot. It’s been a great push forward in technology. The core connected viewer is someone that wants as much of that data and as much of that experience as possible.
Being able to kind of figure out what you’re watching and what you’re engaging with across platforms—it’s never going to be a perfect system. But we think we’re getting pretty good at it. And that allows us to really have a fan open up their app or their computer and say, oh, this is what you want to watch.
Serving Fans, Wherever They Are
All Things Insights: Great examples of advancing the tools, the functionality, all of the capabilities of the app. How do you see the future shaping up? What sort of trends do you see happening in the sports space?
Benjamin Smith: I think we’re just going to continue to be in a world where you want to be able to serve fans in an on-demand capacity, whether that’s a highlight package, a news article, a podcast. We know that there is sometimes an overwhelming amount of choices that any consumer of media is going to have. And I think continuing to be nimble and flexible in how we program for that world is really important.
I’d love to be able to say that we’ll get back to a spot where cable and satellite penetration is what it was five, ten years ago. But we know that’s probably not going to happen based on all of the trends that we see. And so I think because of that, it really makes us try to future proof what we do. And as a researcher, there are millions upon millions of fans that are just not going to watch a live game due to access or time reasons. OK, how do we get someone to spend a few minutes with us instead or how do we make it so that, I don’t know what I’m going to do tonight. I’m going to actually flip over to ESPN first as opposed to head over somewhere else, let’s have it be Disney-plus or one of the other many content houses.
Companies that continue to make choices easier for their consumers are going to probably be the ones that are best positioned in the future.
Forecasting What’s Ahead in Sports Media Research
All Things Insights: If you had unlimited resources, what kind of project would you undertake to improve sports media research? What would be on your fantasy list, so to speak?
Benjamin Smith: This is definitely a little more geared towards my role specifically. As part of my entire team, we make estimates. What do you see next year’s NBA audience is doing compared to the previous year? We get down as close as predicting or estimating audiences for individual games. We’re pretty good at it. We think over a long enough sample, we get pretty close most years.
But sometimes we’re in a spot where we’ve missed a single game by a lot, especially in a big moment. One of the sports I work on is hockey. Well, if we estimate a Stanley Cup final game to do three million, but it does four, what did we miss?
So I wish there was something, or could we really use AI here? All of the factors that go into a live TV audience, and we miss by a lot or we’re dead on. Can we do a postmortem where it’s like, maybe we missed because we over or underestimated the team or player popularity. Was the scoring margin something completely out of whack? What was going on TV or in the news at the same time? Whenever we see anything that falls within our own standard deviation of what we would consider an acceptable miss, I’ll go talk to the folks that run the college football and the NFL, the strategy on our teams. Help me out here. What did I miss?
We all try to collectively work with our dozens of combined years of experience. But it would be great just to pop a result in there and be like, oh, well, this is why you missed it. It’s because these three things were the biggest drivers of that. I would love to be able to get a little more clarity on what makes a estimate of ours really good or really bad.
That way we could ideally learn from it in the future so that, when something comes in much higher than our estimate, or in the cases when it’s much lower, it would be great to have a good answer to that as opposed to just like, well, that’s sports.
All Things Insights: I think that goes into what you were saying about AI and your role in particular for forecasting and estimating and the strategy behind that. It’s very difficult to forecast the future. One can only hope that the NY Giants may have a better year next year.
Benjamin Smith: Cross all my fingers and toes on that one.
All Thing Insights: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Benjamin, we really appreciate the time.
Benjamin Smith: See you in Miami.
