How ESPN Uses AI Audio Separation to Unlock Sports Content for Rights-Cleared Distribution on Streaming, Digital, and Social Media
The Challenge: Valuable Sports Content, Licensing and Workflow Constraints
ESPN is the leading sports media company, and it has a simple mission: Serve sports fans. Anytime, Anywhere. However, doing that can be very complex.
ESPN manages a vast library of live, archival, and digital content that they bring to fans across the sports industry’s leading digital products, as well as the #1 sports social media footprint. In doing that, there is enormous focus on managing and respecting a wide and complex array of specific rights guidelines for video and audio content. Across ESPN’s multimedia ecosystem, audio constraints can limit flexibility, usability, and distribution speed.
Archived programming may include music with expired licenses. Sports highlights often contain copyrighted arena or walkout music. Game footage and behind-the-scenes content frequently include entangled dialogue, music, and crowd noise — with no original audio stems available.
When dialogue, music, and ambient sound are embedded in a single mixed track, editing, audio isolation, and availability for redistribution become time-consuming or costly or both — particularly for streaming, digital, and social media distribution.
However, ESPN has a heritage of embracing technology to drive innovation that stretches for more than 46 years. So, they turned to technology to help find a scalable solution to:
- Remove or isolate copyrighted music from sports highlights
- Preserve authentic commentary and crowd energy
- Improve audio intelligibility in complex live sports environments
- Accelerate turnaround of rights-cleared assets for distribution across television, streaming, digital, and social platforms
The Solution: AI-Powered Music Removal and Audio Separation
Originally connected through the Disney Accelerator program, AudioShake began collaborating with ESPN to apply advanced sound separation technology across multiple workflows.
AudioShake’s models separate mixed audio into dialogue, music, and effects — without requiring original stems. This enables ESPN teams to identify and remove copyrighted music, isolate commentary, and prepare content for redistribution while maintaining production quality and rights compliance.
What began as a targeted archival solution has expanded into a scalable sports media solution.
Use Case 1: Unlocking Archival and Rights-Restricted Sports Content
For digital properties — including programming such as ESPN’s cult-favorite The Ocho — legacy sports content has often contained licensed music that restricted modern distribution.
AudioShake’s AI-powered music removal technology allows ESPN to:
- Detect and isolate copyrighted music embedded in sports footage
- Remove music while preserving commentary and natural stadium sound
- Prepare archival content for streaming and digital distribution
- Reintroduce rights-cleared sports content that was previously not usable, making it available across new platforms to new audiences and extending the lifespan and reach of ESPN’s archive.
That capability played perfectly into a recent ESPN production. For a 2026 Super Bowl ad, ESPN used AudioShake to isolate legendary quarterback Phil Simms' voice in the clip of his iconic post-game "I'm going to Disney World!" catchphrase. Because of ambient in-stadium music, licensing the full clip with music would have been cost-prohibitive for just a few seconds in a 60-second commercial. So, ESPN and AudioShake were able to license a portion of the clip, separate the ambient music and extract Simms’ vocal, making the clip usable for ESPN's 2026 Super Bowl
Use Case 2: Music Removal for Sports Highlights and Social Media
Sports highlights frequently capture copyrighted music in arenas, walkouts, and broadcast feeds. This can present legal risk when distributing clips across digital, social, and streaming platforms.
By separating music from commentary and crowd noise, ESPN editors can:
- Remove copyrighted music from sports highlights
- Reduce legal risk across platforms by respecting copyright
- Publish rights-cleared clips more broadly and confidently
This enables faster distribution across social, digital, and streaming channels.
Use Case 3: Dialogue Isolation in Live Sports Environments
Live sports environments are acoustically complex. Sideline interviews, locker room footage, and mic’d-up moments often include overlapping speech, music, and crowd noise.
With AudioShake’s AI-powered dialogue isolation tool, Dialogue RT, ESPN can:
- Improve clarity of interviews and commentary
- Preserve authentic atmosphere
- Deliver higher-quality content more efficiently
Evolving Media Workflows
The collaboration also reflects a broader shift in sports media operations: AI tools that reduce technical friction while preserving creative intent and respecting intellectual property rights.
By making mixed sports audio more easily editable, ESPN can extend the reach, impact and value of its content library, reduce legal risk, and support increasingly flexible rights-cleared distribution strategies across television, streaming, digital, and social platforms.
Key Capabilities Used by ESPN
- AI-powered music removal for sports highlights
- Dialogue isolation in live sports broadcasts
- Audio separation for multiplatform compliance
- Archival sports content remediation without original stems
“As ESPN continues to expand the ways we reach and serve sports fans in an age of content abundance, it’s important to lean into groundbreaking technology solutions that can help us bring the right content to the fans that want it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Working with AudioShake to leverage their innovative audio separation lets us unlock more content for fans by accelerating and modernizing workflows and ensuring we can deliver more high-quality sports content to fans wherever they are.”
— Kevin Lopes, ESPN Vice President, Business Development & Innovation