On October 9, NBA China and Alibaba Cloud announced a multi-year partnership, with Alibaba Cloud becoming the official cloud computing and AI partner of NBA China. The collaboration debuted the Real-Time 360 Replay solution at the NBA China Games. On October 10 and October 12, Macao hosted two intense NBA preseason matchups between the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns. These games not only delivered a high-level basketball spectacle for fans but also sparked an unprecedented visual revolution in live broadcasting. Powered by Real-Time 360 Replay technology, global audiences experienced immersive, multi-perspective viewing like never before—bringing every highlight within reach.
● Next-generation live broadcast visuals driven by new technology: The integration of AI and cloud computing has achieved a closed loop in production, transforming 360° Real-Time Replay and low-latency multi-view interaction from concept to a stable, deliverable product capability—setting a new benchmark for sports broadcasting.
● Enhanced viewing experience: With multi-perspective access to key game moments, fans shift from passive viewers to active participants. This immersive engagement opens new commercial opportunities for rights holders, including premium replay services and customizable advertising.
● Scalable and replicable across sports: Alibaba Video Cloud’s Real-Time 360 Replay technology has been battle-tested in major international events, proving its stability and scalability. It is now poised for broader application across football, tennis, motorsports, and esports, among others.
Leveraging the fully upgraded Real-Time 360 Replay technology, the live broadcast delivers four groundbreaking visual experiences:
Animation Overlay – Data Visualization in Motion: Transforming athletic performance into dynamic visuals, this feature overlays players' real-time motion data onto the live broadcast, making key metrics come alive during gameplay.
By deeply integrating computer vision, AI motion recognition, and real-time rendering technologies, athletic performance data is transformed into an immersive, perceptible data stream—turning every on-court highlight into a visually rich experience. Leveraging multi-camera HD video capture and deep learning model analysis, the system precisely calculates key metrics such as player jump height, release angle, ball trajectory, entry angle, and apex of the parabolic arc (maximum height), then overlays them onto the live broadcast with low latency and high accuracy.
In the clip of Devin Booker’s three-point shot, viewers not only witness the graceful arc of the ball swishing through the net but also instantly see the optimal release angle of 49.153° and the perfect entry angle of 47.893°. These once-invisible technical details are now vividly displayed as intuitive data animations—bringing deeper insights to fans and even serving as critical feedback for player training and performance optimization.
Multi-Angle Replay: Freezing time and space with a 360-degree surround view, it captures every split-second of aerial duels, immersing audiences in the full intensity of on-court confrontations from all angles.
The Multi-Angle Replay technology may not be unfamiliar to many — its stunning appearances at the Paris Olympics and the Year of the Dragon CCTV Spring Festival Gala remain fresh in public memory. Now, it has quietly evolved: with a complete upgrade to its underlying algorithms, the technology delivers smoother visuals and greater flexibility in real-time delivery.
Moreover, powered by AI-driven scene reconstruction, Multi-Angle Replay has precisely overcome long-standing optical challenges in free-viewpoint rendering—such as light refraction and mirror-like reflections—achieving stable, high-fidelity reconstruction even in highly reflective or complex lighting environments for the first time.
Whether it’s contrasting shadows and highlights or glass surface reflections, every detail is now accurately reproduced. From this point forward, Multi-Angle Replay is no longer constrained by the environment—technology is making “what you see is what you get” a reality.
TimeSlices – Dynamic Capture in Motion: Seamlessly reconstructing the split-second of a player’s breakthrough, this technology delivers ultra-smooth, frame-accurate visualization of rapid movements, as if freezing motion in time and space.
By deeply integrating large language models with advanced visual understanding, TimeSlices has achieved a breakthrough in modeling methodology. In complex game scenarios involving multi-player confrontations and frequent occlusions, the new algorithm
demonstrates enhanced contextual comprehension and pose reasoning, significantly improving motion continuity and spatial accuracy.
Leveraging the strong generalization capability from the massive parameters of large models, TimeSlices can rapidly adapt to diverse sports such as basketball, football, and ice hockey, enabling efficient cross-sport deployment. Through fine-grained lightweight optimization, it achieves performance close to traditional high-performance algorithms while maintaining high-precision tracking—truly balancing intelligence with practicality.
Technology is more than just spectacle—it’s about ensuring that every sprint, every sudden cut, and every explosive move is precisely captured and clearly "seen."
Multi-Angle Replay Plus – Enhanced Multi-View Technology: By freely combining multiple visual effects—Animation Overlay, Multi-Angle Replay, and TimeSlices—this advanced solution unlocks infinite possibilities in sports visualization, enabling dynamic, cinematic, and data-rich storytelling with unprecedented creative flexibility.
The following video demonstrates the integrated application of Multi-Angle Replay and TimeSlices. Leveraging TimeSlices’ trajectory recognition, the system automatically detects and identifies key action moments—such as drives, shots, rebounds, and collisions—within the live footage. It then reconstructs each of these critical actions in full 360° panoramic view. Viewers can simultaneously explore multi-angle details of continuous movements within a single unified frame, gaining deeper insight into the dynamics of every pivotal play.
From October 8 to October 11, the Real-Time 360 Replay booth at the NBA House exhibition hall in The Venetian Macao became one of the most popular attractions. Fans had the opportunity to participate directly in content creation, generating their own personalized 360° real-time replays and immersing themselves in the visual magic brought by AI technology.
During this period, the video cloud platform produced a total of 5,474 special-effect videos for fans. Participants included not only NBA enthusiasts, but also numerous celebrities from the sports, entertainment, and business sectors, who actively engaged in the experience and provided overwhelmingly positive feedback.
As the summer of 2024 closed with the spectacular Paris Olympics and the NBA China Games in October 2025 continue to draw immense attention, one thing has become clear: what truly brings audiences into the heart of the action is not just the thrilling moments on the court, but also the technological power to reproduce the live scene in real time and reconstruct the game experience from multiple angles.
By bringing its Real-Time 360 Replay technology to the NBA China Games, Alibaba Cloud has delivered a significant brand and technical showcase at the intersection of AI-powered video technology and live sports production. This deployment has proven the solution’s stability, ultra-low latency, and replicability—key attributes required for becoming the new standard at major international sporting events.
More importantly, this capability is not limited to basketball. It can seamlessly expand to other sports such as football, tennis, motorsports, and esports. At the same time, viewers are shifting from passive spectators to active participants: switching perspectives at will, choosing their preferred replay angles, and having AI automatically generate highlight reels will soon become the norm.
Meanwhile, AI applications in live viewing experiences, real-time commentary, and user-generated content creation will only grow richer, paving the way for a more immersive and personalized sports ecosystem.
This is not merely a technological upgrade—it is a redefinition of how we watch sports.
Looking ahead, we look forward to collaborating with more partners to transform “watching the game” into a new form of “participating in the game.”
Stay tuned with Alibaba Video Cloud, and join us in shaping the next generation of sports viewing standards.
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