OZ Sports Turns Every Match–Anytime, Anywhere–Into Must See-TV, At a Fraction of the Cost
If world-class coverage is unaffordable for the majority of sports, you don’t just trim the economics—you rewrite them entirely.
That’s the approach of OZ Sports, a Nordic sports technology company founded by serial entrepreneur Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson. The company’s focus is on leveling the playing field in sports broadcasting, tackling a fundamental market failure: an estimated 90% of all competitive sporting events are not broadcast due to the prohibitive cost and complexity of traditional production.
A member of the 2025 cohort of Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech, OZ Sports has been recognized on the prestigious Fast Company list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, and has received the European Commission’s Seal of Excellence for high-impact projects that meet rigorous standards in innovation and efficiency.
The company’s core product, the OZ Smart Stadium, is a permanently installed infrastructure that transforms any venue into a 24/7, broadcast-ready production house. The system uses computer vision, AI, and robotic technologies to automate the production of sports at the highest quality, reducing costs by up to 90%. Its AI-driven, multi-camera 4K technology delivers Champions League-quality broadcasts featuring slow-motion replays, real-time graphics, and industry-first AI-driven optical zoom close-ups.
The cost disparity between an OZ production and a conventional one is staggering. At a recent CONCACAF Women’s U-20 Championship, a traditional 30-person broadcast truck and crew cost $640,000 to cover the 17-game tournament. The OZ Sports workflow, zero on-site staff, using six robotic cameras and AI direction, cost just $35,000.
Tripp Baltz, Head of Research for Comcast SportsTech and Boomtown Innovation, recently spoke with Pétur Marteinsson, Chief Commercial Officer of OZ Sports, to learn more about the company and its mission to broadcast the future of sports.
TRIPP:
Nice to be with you, Pétur. Tell me first how you got your start. What has been your career arc?
PÉTUR:
My background is in soccer; I was a professional player for 12 years in Sweden, Norway, and England, and I played for the Icelandic national team throughout that time. When my playing career ended, I earned an MBA and worked as an expert football commentator for several years. I was a TV guy, in front of the camera, following the Icelandic national team to the Euros in France and the World Cup in Russia. With my background in professional sports and television, OZ Sports was a perfect match. Now I am on the other side of the camera, or more like in front of the computer since we don’t need people near the cameras or the stadiums.
TRIPP:
And how did you connect with OZ?
PÉTUR:
I’ve known Gudjon, our CEO, since we were both 16. We went to the same high school, and even then, he was a kind of tech wizard. At 17, he already had a startup with 15 people working for him. I followed his career from a distance; he was always doing something amazing. He built companies that were either IPO’d or bought by industry players. Gudjon has also always been big on infrastructure, built several telcos and fiber-to-the-home networks, that is exactly the right experience needed for a play like that of OZ : To roll out the best sports production infrastructure with the OZ Smart Stadium system.
A couple of years ago, we met again, and he showed me what the team was working on. It was a November night in Reykjavik, windy and rainy, and OZ was producing a U-17 national team game between Iceland and Spain. I saw a couple young guys, almost like gamers, producing the entire match remotely from an office with just simple oversight via browser-based OZ Studio. It was a multi-camera 4K production that looked and felt like a Champions League broadcast: incredible closeups, switching between cameras seamlessly, showing the sweat on the players’ faces and the raindrops in the floodlights. They had instant replays and slow-motion. I was blown away. It was the first time I saw the OZ’s AI production in action, and I knew I had to be a part of it. I knew this was changing the game.
TRIPP:
What was the light bulb moment for OZ Sports, the minute you all realized there was a fundamental problem to solve?
PÉTUR:
Having played in European and national team games, I’d see the stadiums the day before a match, filled with technicians laying cables and camera crews setting up. The logistics and cost were immense. That was for the big games—the Premier League, NFL, or NBA. But for the vast majority of sports, there was simply nobody there. A great number of games are never produced for TV or streaming because it’s far too expensive and personnel-heavy. It was an uneven game, and we knew we could close the gap.
Think of women’s sports, where athletes put in the exact same time and effort, but their games are poorly produced. It’s often a low-quality, single-camera feed. The same goes for all the smaller leagues, lower divisions, and youth games and tournaments. This is the massive opportunity we are built to solve. Our OZ Smart Stadium solution is always ready, 24/7, delivering the same elite production quality for a youth tournament as you’d expect from a top professional league. The problem is that so much of sport is invisible, and visibility is the absolute key to any sports economy. We make it visible for sports fans around the world.
TRIPP:
And it’s something that the big broadcasters are very interested in. Comcast has an entire youth sports division. AI is what makes this all possible, right?
PÉTUR:
Exactly. Our product is the OZ Smart Stadium, a complete infrastructure for live sports production. The team has been working on this for years, with robust IP and our entire AI technical stack as ours. At the same time, the hardware is from top vendors like Sony and NVIDIA. It’s built from the ground up by our team of PhDs in machine learning, computer vision, and robotics. It’s one of the few ultra low-latency AI pipelines that can process complex team sports for both quality production and data analytics.
We are teaching our AI the language of sports. We started with soccer, and our AI has learned the game inside and out. It’s not just about tracking the ball. It’s about storytelling. For example, the most interesting shot after a goal isn’t the ball in the net; it’s the celebration of the scorer or the disappointment of the goalkeeper. Our six cameras have learned these nuances and work together to tell that story. Now we are expanding into other verticals like basketball, and can’t wait to bring our technology to even more sports.
TRIPP:
So the AI is essentially a virtual director, with the cameras coordinating autonomously?
PÉTUR:
That’s a great way to put it. The cameras are constantly communicating, acting as a team. One camera might say, “I’m on a tight close-up of the striker,” so another camera knows to hold a wider, tactical view. This has taken years of machine learning to perfect, and now we can promise we don’t miss a thing.
What’s also critical for our partners is that the OZ Smart Stadium is a hybrid solution. It’s an open infrastructure. Our standard six-camera AI production is the foundation, but a broadcaster can easily augment that by plugging in their own manned cameras for a major event. So, for a key championship match, they can scale up to a full 20-camera Champions League-style production, using our infrastructure as the backbone. It offers complete flexibility. So, if it’s an OZ Smart Stadium enabled venue, it means more opportunities for value creation for the rights holders of both media rights and data.
TRIPP:
Who are your chief clients?
PÉTUR:
Our business clients are any type of rights holders, like the leagues, federations, clubs, broadcasters, and streamers of the world. They just tap into our infrastructure to produce world-class content affordably and at scale. In some cases, a broadcaster already owns the rights. In others, there is no broadcast deal on the table, so we work directly with leagues or clubs.
Ultimately, our customers are the fans on the sofa. They don’t care who produces the game; they just want the best quality broadcast. And their demand and expectations are ever increasing.
TRIPP:
You are working closely with Sky Sports, right?
PÉTUR:
Yes, Sky Sports is an industry leader, and we are learning a tremendous amount from their expertise. We are preparing a pilot with them, which is a great validation of our technology. Our strategy is to partner with a few key industry leaders at the start and then roll out globally. We offer a turnkey solution with no upfront cost. We operate on an annual lease or a per-match fee, shifting the expense from a large capital investment to a manageable operating cost, which is a game-changer for our clients.
TRIPP:
What made you decide to apply to the Comcast SportsTech program?
PÉTUR:
We were encouraged to apply, and when we got in, there was definitely a bit of excitement to work deeply with industry leaders like Comcast, NBC, Sky, and many of their SportsTech partners like the Premier League. It has been a great chance to listen and learn from the best in the business. It confirmed our vision that we have a big piece of the puzzle that fits perfectly into the future of this industry.
TRIPP:
What are the tech trends and changes you see coming on the horizon over the next 12 to 24 months?
PÉTUR:
Further automation is obviously the big one; it’s becoming foundational in everything, like electricity. Simpler distribution of roles will happen. We’re handling the infrastructure part, rolling out the best possible capturing solutions that will open up a new ecosystem for innovation in AI and computer vision to tap into our high-quality video and data capture feeds. That will foster a new breed of companies and speed up innovation in the field.
For us, we’re doing the boring job of running and operating the infrastructure, making sure that both our ecosystem partners and customers are always accessing the best possible quality feed, and setting the standard for this new data infrastructure. This opens up revenue streams for our partners, from high-end broadcasts and streams to data feeds for companies servicing coaches for player analytics, and for sports medicine groups working on injury prevention.
We’re always thinking about the next generation of fans and fan engagement in general. How will they consume sports in the future? They want instant, engaging content. Our system is built for that. Because we track everything: all the players, referees and the ball 50x per second, we can instantly create highlight clips for social media, feeding that demand in real-time. This includes our new vertical mobile streaming options plus special player feeds.
Moving forward, it all comes back to visibility. Without high-quality streams and broadcasts, it’s incredibly difficult to monetize sports. This is especially true for women’s soccer. There is a huge, passionate audience for these games, but brands have been held back by the old, expensive production model. We’re changing that. By making more sports visible, we’ll drive more interest, which allows clubs, federations, and leagues to finally build the thriving economies their athletes and fans deserve.