I don't watch sports live, I watch on a delay. This saves a lot of time immediately by skipping commercials (if I haven't paid to remove them, as I did in the Olympics) but also things like time-outs, long no-action intervals (whistles, pitching changes, etc.) But I also skip far more. The best Winter Olympics sport is curling, for many reasons, but you can watch it in far less time if you are so inclined, without missing the key events. For example, you can usually skip the first few ends, and also the first stones of most ends.

But I've tested the ability of LLMs to understand what parts of the game are "interesting" according to rules I have set. Your rules may differ from mine, of course, but that's the cool thing about using the LLMs--you can craft your own prompt to define what you want to see.

For most sports, networks will make "highlight" reels, but they tend to be too compressed, to the point of spoiling the result. For example, if you see mostly the scoring, you know for every highlight it's very likely to show a goal, and just seeing what goal the action is around is enough to give you a big hint. Worse, on Peacock, all the highlight reels come with a full result spoiler in the title, so you can't browse them at all.

But soon an AI will be able to craft your own highlight reel, with your own tastes in what to include. The AIs can do more than just pull out the scoring or other key plays. They can learn what plays and moments all the different commentators were talking about. Most importantly, you can tell the AI to deliberately include some other plays that don't have scoring or other elements to retain the essential element of surprise. You can include a mix of randomness as well as estimates of how interesting the play is so you aren't able to know how many of the "nothing big" plays you will be shown. That means as you watch each play, you won't have any clue as to what's coming, only that it's probably likely to be good. How probably, you can set. And it can automatically remove the stuff you know you would prefer to skip over.

If you prefer watching the whole game, if you want more game rather than less, you would not use this, or you would use it just to remove the obviously less interesting things like time-outs. You would control it. And it will work better on some sports, like baseball and curling, than hockey or soccer/football.

Of course, this does not fit with commercial-sponsored TV, it's best for paid TV, but that's how I would prefer it. I'm happy to pay. It can be done even on fairly live events. You might start a 3 hour event 2 hours in, and tell it to give you the best 80 minutes so you only go a little later. Or you could even time it to be live at the very end to avoid external spoilers. (I have seen external spoilers include things like all the cars outside your window honking if your local team just won a major event.)

Olympic Notebook

Updating my notes on watching the Olympics, this year I did not use MythTV, in spite of its vastly superior interface and response time, and stuck with Peacock Premium Plus (no commercials.) There were a few reasons for that. The biggest was that the broadcast feed was limited in events and usually quite delayed, but the Peacock feed had all events without commercials by the time I would watch, including the "venue feed" with no commentary on many events.

The Peacock feed had much better video quality, including some 4K-HDR on a few items like the opening/closing ceremonies, but they didn't do nearly as much as they could. But the general HD feed was still much better on my OLED TV than the 1080i broadcast. Sadly, like all streaming, the interface for seeking around and 10 second skip wasn't nearly as good, but I was able to get by. One way to get both is to play the Peacock fee on a computer and record it to a local file and watch the local file. Won't get you HDR or 4K, and they now have DRM trying to interfere. In the future, I hope to be able to do an AI edited version and not need to do much manual skipping.

As usual, my focus was on sports that pass my "know who won" test, which is only a small subset of winter Olympic sports. Most sports have the winner decided by a clock, computer, or points from judges or algorithms. That's not nearly as interesting as actual races and 2 competitor eliminations.

So the best sports are things like Curling, Hockey, Short Track, Ski/Snowboard cross and mass stars in speed skating, cross-country and biathalon. For other events, I just watch a couple of the winners since otherwise events blend together in similarity and you are just looking at judging scores. SkiMo, a new event, is somewhat of a race but it also has judging for points so you can't see who won until you see the judges' scores. Sliding, Ski Jump, Downhill, Snowboard were not watched that much.

Good to see more mixed events, but some of them are too artificial. Things like relays (where the "team" mates need never have even met before the event) or "add the times" events where the team need not even meet during the event aren't real team sports. Hockey is a real team sport.