Genius Sports Sees Direct Fan Monetisation as Media Rights Slide

The claim is a big one for a company that still earns most of its money from bookmakers. Locke told SportsPro the revenue split is "60 per cent betting and 40 per cent media" and that he expects it to flip "in the not too distant future."

His argument rests on a shift in how fans are reached. Consumption is moving away from broadcast, Locke told SportsPro, and leagues outside the top tier are seeing rights fees fall. "The NFL, the Premier League or the NBA will be fine, but they're at the pinnacle," he said. "Other leagues are coming under enormous pressure from falling rights fees." That pressure, Locke argues, pushes leagues and owners to sell to fans directly rather than through broadcasters. SportsPro published the interview on 17 September, making it the oldest source in this piece. The rest of the picture comes from the last three days.

Instagram puts its analytics inside a chat window

On Wednesday, Instagram began rolling out an AI assistant inside Edits, its video editor for creators, to all US users of the app. Brett Westervelt, who leads Edits, wrote in a blog post that the tool reads an account's Instagram metrics, including follows, views, video retention, likes and shares, and combines that with comments, Instagram trends and audience interests. Creators can ask which reel held attention and which did not, then get suggested concepts, hooks, captions and scripts based on their own track record. The Next Web reported the rollout on Thursday. Instagram said the assistant is free with a daily prompt limit, with more usage planned through Meta One subscriptions.

That is the same trajectory Genius is selling, just at a different scale: data captured from an audience, turned into recommendations. Genius says its GeniusIQ platform processes computer-vision data points on every athlete, official and ball to build a digital twin of a live event, supporting tools such as semi-automated offside technology.

Infrastructure and trust problems sit underneath

The appetite for that data is real. So is the bill for storing and processing it, and the political resistance to paying it.

The Verge published a months-long investigation on Thursday into Stratos, a proposed 40,000-acre AI campus in Utah backed by investor Kevin O'Leary. The project, known as Wonder Valley, was planned for nine gigawatts of power, more than double the average usage of the entire state. Features writer Josh Dzieza told The Verge the project "fell apart in a bunch of anger from the local community," and that it had "completely upended Utah politics." Tax treatment of that infrastructure is also contested.

The Decoder reported on Wednesday that Meta classified its AI data centers as "pilot models" and Nvidia chips as experimental materials to claim a federal research tax credit worth $3.9 billion in 2025, up from $2 billion a year earlier, citing the New York Times. Meta's own SEC filings warn the savings could be challenged.

On Wednesday, The Guardian reported that more than 44,000 people have filed legal objections to NHS England over their health data being handled by the Palantir-operated Federated Data Platform. The objections cite article 21 of the UK GDPR. Palantir says the platform is helping cut waiting lists and that patient data remains in the UK under NHS instructions.

Politico reported on Wednesday that Lighthouse Reports filed a complaint against the European Commission under the Aarhus Convention, accusing it of a "wall of silence" over data center energy and water use. The Commission's own figures put Europe's data centers at 20.7 terawatt-hours of electricity and more than 8 million cubic meters of water in 2025, up 26 per cent and 52 per cent on 2024, though the totals come from incomplete data published only in aggregate. Genius analyses more than 240,000 sporting events a year, according to SportsPro. Whether leagues get to monetise those fans directly may depend on how the next few of those complaints land.