Soccer Match Broadcast Glitch Sparks Debate in China About Virtual Ads -Some Chinese Euro 2024 viewers noticed that the pitchside advertisements they saw on their screens were not the same ones that fans were seeing live

Some Chinese viewers watching a UEFA European Football Championship match this week noticed a glitch in the broadcast that revealed the pitchside advertisements they saw on their screens were not the same ones that fans were seeing live at Veltins Arena in Germany.

The glitch sparked discussion in China about the state of virtual advertising technology and how it targets viewers depending on where they are watching from. In the case of the Euro 2024 match between Serbia and England — in which parts of a running player’s body appeared to disappear into an advertisement image — most of the ads that TV viewers in China saw were for Chinese brands.

Soccer fans watching from home also noticed that the ads in the live broadcast were different from the ones in the instant replays.

The technology used in this advertising wizardry is called digital billboard replacement, or DBR, which was invented by Supponor Ltd., a London-based company. DBR is used to virtually change the content of billboards to show different ads for different audiences depending on their region.

To make this happen, the technology requires lots of data in advance, such as the positions of the sidelines and the goals, in order to create a scene where virtual and real elements coexist, said Zhang Bo, a specialist in sports broadcasting.

In this half-real, half-virtual environment, three-dimensional reconstruction and image segmentation technologies are adopted to display the advertising images into the proper position in real time, said Zhang, who was also a senior broadcasting engineer for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

Getting all this to work correctly requires specially made LED screens, which have extra red pixels added on top of their standardized RGB configuration, said Hao Dapeng, a former technical director of the global live broadcasting division at Chinese streaming services provider LeTV. The extra red pixels emit infrared waves that can be captured by on-site cameras for positioning.

Use of the technology, which could be considered as a kind of augmented reality tech, creates the illusion among viewers that an event they are watching is sponsored by companies from wherever they are watching from. For the Chinese audience watching the Euro 2024 on Monday, it looked as if the Serbia-England match was sponsored primarily by Chinese brands.

Actually, of the top 13 official sponsors of the tournament, only five are Chinese companies. They include home-appliance maker Hisense Group Corp., electric vehicle giant BYD Co. Ltd. and smartphone manufacturer Vivo Mobile Communications Co. Ltd., according to the Union of European Football Associations’ (UEFA) website.

The last Euro championship, delayed for a year by the Covid-19 pandemic, had an unprecedented influx of Chinese sponsors, with Hisense, Vivo and TikTok all listed as official international sponsors.

While the organizers of top international sporting events are employing innovative technology in pitchside advertising, many of their Chinese peers are struggling to profit. Even though there are several Chinese companies offering technologies similar to DBR, virtual advertising cannot be applied on a large scale in China because most event organizers don’t have the budget to pay for it, Zhang said.

Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com) and editor Michael Bellart (michaelbellart@caixin.com)