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We’re excited to announce that 4D Sight is joining Sports Business Journal’s Tech Week 26 as a sponsor for the first time. The event runs May 18–20, 2026 across two New York venues — the awards ceremony at the Hard Rock Hotel and the conference at TheTimesCenter — and brings together the most forward-thinking leaders in sport to drive innovation and shape the next chapter of the industry.

For us, this is a milestone. Tech Week is the room where leagues, broadcasters, rights-holders, technology companies, and investors set the agenda for what live sport looks like in the next five years. After a year in which we extended our work with the UFC, helped power UFC sponsorship revenue to a record $314M, and shipped real-time region-aware sponsor swapping at scale, we wanted to be in that room as a participant — not a spectator.

Why We’re Showing Up

The conversations driving Tech Week 26 are exactly the conversations we wake up thinking about:

• Digital Content Innovation — how live sport gets distributed and monetized across replays, highlights, and social
• Fan Experience Technology — what regional, personalized experiences look like at the broadcast layer
• Venue & Franchise Operations Technology — how production environments are evolving from hardware-led to software-led
• Artificial Intelligence — the obvious one, and the one we’ve been operationalizing inside live UFC, WWE, and NFL broadcasts every week

We’ll be showcasing how frame-aware virtual signage is rebuilding broadcast inventory at the pixel layer — and how 4D Sight is helping rights-holders unlock 4× more sellable surfaces per camera, sell into previously restricted ad categories without compliance risk, and persist sponsor value across the full content lifecycle.

Tech Week is where the next decade of sports media gets debated. We want to be in that conversation with the people building it.

Come Find Us

If you’ll be at Tech Week 26, come say hi. We’d love to talk through:

• How leagues and broadcasters are using region-aware insertion to unlock previously blocked ad categories
• What pixel-level measurement looks like when it’s delivered as a programmable API instead of a quarterly PDF
• The 4→16 brand-insert math behind UFC’s 25% YoY sponsorship growth
• How publisher-owned esports streams are being monetized without an SDK or game-engine integration

Can’t Make It in Person?

Tech Week 26 has a virtual access option for $295 if you can’t make it to New York. Or, if you’d rather just talk — the team is taking pre-event meetings now and post-event follow-ups through the week of May 25.

Book a meeting with our team and we’ll lock in a slot.

More about the event: sbjtechweek.com/2026.

UFC sponsorship revenue hit $314.3 million in 2025 — up 25% year-over-year, an additional $62.9 million on top of the prior year, according to data published by SponsorUnited. Total UFC revenue for the year cleared $1.5 billion at a 57% EBITDA margin. By any measure, it was a defining year for the league.

What’s underneath the headline number is more interesting. UFC’s revenue surge is being driven not by more events — but by more sellable surfaces inside the same events. That’s the part of the story that connects directly to the work we do.

The Asset Mix Tells the Real Story

Across the 2025 season, UFC tracked 481 sponsorship assets against 104 active brand partners. The breakdown of what those assets actually were:

• Social Media: 245 assets (55%) — the single largest category
• Signage: 91 assets (21%)
• Digital & Content: 20 assets (5%)
• Event & Experiential: 20 assets (5%)
• Official Designations: 13 assets (3%)

Read the first line again. More than half of UFC’s sponsorship inventory now lives in social distribution and digital content — replays, highlights, social clips, and broadcast surfaces that extend a single event’s commercial value across the full content lifecycle.

This is exactly the kind of inventory legacy hardware-based virtual advertising could never deliver. Physical perimeter signage stops earning the moment the live broadcast ends. Frame-aware virtual signage doesn’t.

The same camera angle. The same live event. Different sponsors per region, different sponsors per replay, different sponsors per highlight clip. That’s the inventory engine.

Bet365 Replacing DraftKings: Why It Matters

One of the most-reported partnership shifts of the year was bet365 replacing DraftKings as UFC’s betting partner. On the surface it’s a sponsor swap. Underneath, it’s a structural argument for region-aware advertising.

Sportsbooks are licensed market by market. A sportsbook that’s legal in New Jersey may not be licensed in Quebec, São Paulo, or Riyadh. Historically, that compliance friction made the betting category a difficult fit for global sponsorship deals — the same fight broadcast had to either ignore betting in restricted markets, or risk regulatory exposure.

Frame-aware insertion fixes this at the rendering layer. The same camera angle inside the octagon can carry bet365 in territories where it’s licensed, an alternative non-betting sponsor in territories where it isn’t, and a third regional brand in territories where the inventory wasn’t previously sellable at all. One feed, multiple compliant sponsors, simultaneously.

Crypto, Alcohol, and the Rest of the “Restricted” List

The 2025 season also saw Crypto.com hold 13 active assets, Bud Light lead UFC sponsors by asset count, and Monster Energy renew at a nine-figure value. Crypto, alcohol, energy drinks — three categories that have historically been some of the trickiest for global rights-holders because they sit in different regulatory buckets in different markets.

The pattern is clear: the categories driving UFC’s revenue growth are precisely the categories that benefit most from regional, real-time, broadcast-layer sponsor swapping.

Where Frame-Aware Inventory Fits

Our partnership with UFC powers virtual signage delivery across the canvas of the octagon, walkout backdrops, and adjacent broadcast surfaces — visible across 170+ broadcast territories, with regionalization handled at the cloud-rendering layer. Once integrated, new placements turn around in 24 hours.

What that unlocks for UFC’s commercial team:

• New inventory — broadcast surfaces that physical signage cannot economically reach (handheld camera angles, walkout zones, mat surfaces during dynamic action)
• Replay & highlight persistence — sponsors stay correctly placed across the 55%-of-asset-mix social distribution layer
• Regional sponsor variants — bet365 in licensed territories, alternates everywhere else; Crypto.com in approved markets, alternates in restricted ones
• Mid-event rotation — multiple sponsors on the same surface across the course of a single PPV card

Together, those four levers turn a fixed event-day inventory into something that scales with audience, region, and content type.

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On why UFC chose 4D Sight over traditional virtual signage

“Achieving a similar look for our sport is so much harder. This is not the same. It is not.”

What’s Next

TKO has guided to $5.675–$5.775 billion in total revenue for 2026, with industry projections pointing to UFC sponsorship revenue trajecting toward $350M+ within two years. The math behind that projection isn’t just about closing more deals — it’s about the same broadcast yielding more sellable surfaces, more frequently, in more compliant ways.

That’s the case for frame-aware inventory. UFC’s 2025 numbers are what it looks like in production.

Source figures via SponsorUnited — UFC Sponsorship Revenue Hit $314M in 2025 (April 2026).

Every broadcast is sold once. The match goes out, the perimeter boards run their pre-booked sponsors, the camera angles cut through the same surfaces frame after frame, and the inventory is what it always was: fixed, physical, and the same for every viewer in every market. For a category that's been globalized at the rights-fees layer for two decades, the advertising surface inside the broadcast is still stuck in the 1990s.

4D Sight's platform changes that — and the math on what a single live event is worth.

One Match. Multiple Revenue Streams.

Inside one production, our computer vision platform unlocks four distinct yield levers. Together they typically take a feed from 4 to 16 sellable ad slots, with no change to broadcast workflow.

1. New Inventory

Dynamic placements across handheld and high-attention shots — surfaces that were previously impossible to monetize. Walkout backdrops, scorer's tables, behind-the-bench dead zones, mat surfaces in combat sports. We unlock 60%+ of broadcast footage that physical signage simply cannot reach.

2. Replay & Highlights

Ads persist in replays, slow-motion, and social clips — extending sponsor value far beyond the live broadcast window. The same goal that's replayed 12 times in the next 48 hours? The sponsor on the field is monetized 12 more times. More impressions without more airtime.

3. Mid-Event Rotation

Rotate sponsors dynamically during a single event — first quarter, halftime, fourth quarter, post-game — without adding visual clutter. Increase sponsor slots by 3–5x over the course of one game, with each placement delivered with the same pixel accuracy as a fixed board.

4. Regional Monetization

Different sponsors per territory from a single feed. No venue setup, no hardware changes. A viewer in São Paulo, Tokyo, and Riyadh each see signage tuned to their local market — without any change to the production feed leaving the arena. Maximize yield across global markets.

Built for commercial teams. No changes to broadcast production.

Now Add Compliance.

Multiplying inventory only matters if you can sell it — and historically, the most lucrative ad categories have been the most restricted. Sponsors in betting, alcohol, crypto, pharmaceutical, and tobacco face a patchwork of regional rules that vary by country, state, daypart, and audience. The result for rights-holders has been one of three bad outcomes: lost revenue, complex manual editing workflows, or compliance risk that blocks high-value deals from closing in the first place.

Real-Time Sponsor Swapping by Region.

Because 4D Sight inserts placements at the broadcast layer, the same architecture that delivers regional monetization also enables real-time sponsor swapping for compliance. A sportsbook brand can run in territories where it's licensed; a non-alcoholic alternative runs everywhere else — from the same camera, the same frame, the same broadcast feed.

Swapping applies across the entire content lifecycle:

• Live broadcast — regional sponsor activated as the feed leaves the cloud
• Replays — same compliance rules applied automatically to slow-motion and replay angles
• Highlights — post-game packages re-rendered with the right sponsor for each market
• Social distribution — social clips inherit the correct regional placement

What This Unlocks Commercially

• Sell previously blocked categories — betting, crypto, alcohol — without legal risk
• Maximize global sponsorship deals by including territories that were previously off-limits
• Remove compliance friction from sales teams; no manual review per broadcast

Turn restricted inventory into revenue.

How It Stays Safe

Three guarantees, baked into the platform:

• Operates within existing rights and approval frameworks. No re-papering of contracts. No new approval chains.
• No manual editing. Swaps happen at the rendering layer; no editor sits in the loop.
• Fully automated. Once mapped, the rule engine handles regional variants on every event going forward.

Proven Where the Stakes Are Highest

This isn't a roadmap. It's already running on the largest live sports production environments in the world — including UFC, WWE and NFL. After integration, new placements turn around in 24 hours.

If you're a rights-holder, broadcaster, or league with global distribution and regional compliance complexity — the conversation about what your inventory is worth has already changed.

Innovations in content creation and consumption have disrupted the business fundamentals for all forms of media. Now comes AI as the newest disruptor. Among all media genres transformed by AI, live sports stands apart as the one content type that will survive and maintain its appeal simply because the unpredictable thrill of human competition cannot be synthetically created — which explains Big Tech's interest in live sports.

Why sports? Take a global, multi-generational audience of engaged fans, add AI powered by a rich source of personal and behavioral data to enhance the experience, and the result transforms sports into a consistent, reliable, recurring revenue stream delivered on demand. Applying AI algorithms to live sports presents a new opportunity for sports leagues and their advertisers, with the potential to redefine how sports sponsorship is defined. The UFC's SVP of Research and Development stated that AI fundamentally changes "the way you think about your fundamental (ad sales) structure," enabling regional brand targeting beyond just global contracts.

Born out of esports, 4D Sight's real-time native placement technology inserts virtual ads that are indistinguishable from physical signs in sports and 3D native game assets in esports, even in ultra fast-paced and complex games.

Beyond Cookies: Hyper-Personalization for Live Audiences

The application of AI to sports delivers a hyper-personalized experience that goes far beyond crude techniques such as cookie tracking, persona segmentation, and retargeting that treat audiences as categories, not individuals. AI enables hyper-personalization by processing large multi-modal data sets that bring deep contextual and behavioral understanding. The result is highly tailored content that is dynamically segmented and flows seamlessly into an uninterrupted viewing experience. Nobody likes an interruptive ad.

It accomplishes this in the cloud, needing only a video input with no special hardware or on-site staff required. The system's pay-as-you-go “self-serve” interface is designed so clients can manage operations directly without an initial investment.

4D Sight puts to rest the long-standing issue of glitchy virtual ads and can handle handheld camerawork in highly dynamic indoor and outdoor settings.

The End of Hardware-Based Virtual Advertising

Previous to AI, virtual advertising was delivered by an older generation of companies that sold telemetry hardware-based solutions that injected a logo into a game and superimposed it someplace inconspicuous. Physical constraints of hardware literally limit the sport and cause unnecessary safety risk and distraction to athletes.

After a decade of high costs, annoying glitches, and operational inefficiencies compounded by high hardware requirements, those legacy systems have been surpassed.

The UFC's Cohen noted that this technology “marks a very different approach from those used in sports with more static backdrops, such as soccer or baseball,” which typically use simpler overlay technologies over green-screen backdrops or LED signs. Those traditional “upstream” approaches rely on cameras locked on tripods with linked sensors, and largely don't have to deal with people moving into and around the screen.

AI as a Highlight-Aware Ad Engine

The addition of real-time AI to the action means the system can detect special situations that trigger the insertion of relevant advertising messages or sponsor logos unobtrusively onto the screen without interfering with players and action. For example, AI trained to detect a touchdown, home run, free throw, or penalty kick could trigger insertion of an advertiser's logo whenever one of those “highlights” occurs. How does that level of insight happen? AI is at its core an exercise in high-speed pattern recognition. The algorithm trained to identify faces, songs, or read x-rays can now, thanks to massive advances in processing power, also identify changes to the sound and images occurring live on screen.

AI can commercialize a touchdown several ways: it starts by predicting the touchdown will happen, and when it does, AI can measure fan sentiment from the level of cheering in the stadium and then make recommendations or notifications relevant to the moment. AI permits a fan to view the highlight from any point of view, including the players'. Action capture and transformation can be analyzed and played back instantaneously, opening new monetization and advertising insertion opportunities previously thought impossible. Real-time translation of play-by-play commentary into multiple languages opens up access to new regional markets. The contextual and behavioral understanding of the action, combined with real-time graphics and data, are powerful tools — especially for sports bettors.

Inside the UFC Deal

One of the first leagues to deploy 4D Sight's tech is the UFC, which signed a three-year deal with the company to swap its advertisers' logos onto the mat of the famous “octagon” ring.

4D's AI is able to understand and work with the UFC's live feed without needing to have any hardware or staff on site live at the event. The octagon ring doesn't accommodate green screens, and since 4D Sight can work with the handheld cameras used by the UFC, 4D keeps the ads shown on the octagon mat from glitching with an AI model intelligent enough to predict what it doesn't see and avoid the occlusion errors that have marred other attempts at video insertion into live action.

The technology dramatically expands the UFC's potential pool of sponsors seeking one of its most valuable types of ads into 170 territories, and it ensures the league's broadcasts will comply with any country's specific restrictions on advertising for sectors such as gambling, alcohol, or tobacco.

The harnessing of viewer behavior data in real time has opened up the potential pool of brands to more than 170 territories, expanding the UFC's inventory of viewer impressions to not only regional brands seeking specific audiences segmented by geography, but also to advertisers in regulated sectors who must abide by local regulations regarding alcohol, gambling, tobacco, pharmaceutical, financial services, and more. Because 4D Sight's model is predicated on the real-time processing of viewer data, the level of segmentation the UFC can offer potential advertisers goes far beyond the handful of top sponsorship opportunities that could only be considered by global brands in non-regulated sectors.

Rights, Streaming, and the New Sports Economy

AI's impact on live sports is beginning to attract attention, but first it must overcome a complex rights landscape predicated on old business models. From individual athletes and their agents, to their teams, the leagues they play in combined with local broadcasters and streaming services, traditional deal structures used to broadcast live sports will persist for a long time. Yet the landscape for sports media rights has already been transformed by streaming — which is shaking up cable as consumers cut the cord, and opening the door for Big Tech and its vaunted powers of transformation and disruption to shake things up.

For a taste of the turmoil, just check out the saga of Diamond Sports Group and the havoc and opportunities its bankruptcy is wreaking on old ways of delivering live sports. Teams caught in the turmoil are going directly to the fans, with both the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz introducing their own in-market streaming services — an indication the change is happening and opening the door for new technologies to further monetize the one thing that can't be faked and which doesn't “scale” according to Moore's Law: a sports fan's time and attention.

Innovations in content creation and consumption have disrupted the business fundamentals for all forms of media. Now comes AI as the newest disruptor. Among all media genres transformed by AI, live sports stands apart as the one content type that will survive and maintain its appeal simply because the unpredictable thrill of human competition cannot be synthetically created — which explains Big Tech's interest in live sports.

Why sports? Take a global, multi-generational audience of engaged fans, add AI powered by a rich source of personal and behavioral data to enhance the experience, and the result transforms sports into a consistent, reliable, recurring revenue stream delivered on demand. Applying AI algorithms to live sports presents a new opportunity for sports leagues and their advertisers, with the potential to redefine how sports sponsorship is defined.

Born out of esports, 4D Sight's real-time native placement technology inserts virtual ads that are indistinguishable from physical signs in sports and 3D native game assets in esports, even in ultra fast-paced and complex games.

The UFC's SVP of Research and Development stated that AI fundamentally changes “the way you think about your fundamental (ad sales) structure,” enabling regional brand targeting beyond just global contracts.

Beyond the Old Hardware Era

Previous to AI, virtual advertising was delivered by an older generation of companies that sold telemetry hardware-based solutions that injected a logo into a game and superimposed it someplace inconspicuous. Physical constraints of hardware literally limit the sport and cause unnecessary safety risk and distraction to athletes. After a decade of high costs, annoying glitches, and operational inefficiencies compounded by high hardware requirements, those legacy systems have been surpassed.

The UFC's Cohen noted that this technology “marks a very different approach from those used in sports with more static backdrops, such as soccer or baseball,” which typically use simpler overlay technologies over green-screen backdrops or LED signs.

Highlight-Aware Advertising

The addition of real-time AI to the action means the system can detect special situations that trigger the insertion of relevant advertising messages or sponsor logos unobtrusively onto the screen without interfering with players and action. For example, AI trained to detect a touchdown, home run, free throw, or penalty kick could trigger insertion of an advertiser's logo whenever one of those “highlights” occurs.

AI is at its core an exercise in high-speed pattern recognition. The algorithm trained to identify faces, songs, or read x-rays can now, thanks to massive advances in processing power, also identify changes to the sound and images occurring live on screen. AI can commercialize a touchdown several ways: it starts by predicting the touchdown will happen, and when it does, it can measure fan sentiment from the level of cheering in the stadium and then make recommendations or notifications relevant to the moment.

The UFC Partnership

One of the first leagues to deploy 4D Sight's tech is the UFC, which signed a three-year deal with the company to swap its advertisers' logos onto the mat of the famous “octagon” ring. 4D's AI is able to understand and work with the UFC's live feed without needing to have any hardware or staff on site live at the event.

The octagon ring doesn't accommodate green screens, and since 4D Sight can work with the handheld cameras used by the UFC, 4D keeps the ads shown on the octagon mat from glitching with an AI model intelligent enough to predict what it doesn't see and avoid the occlusion errors that have marred other attempts at video insertion into live action.

The harnessing of viewer behavior data in real time has opened up the potential pool of brands to more than 170 territories, expanding the UFC's inventory of viewer impressions to not only regional brands seeking specific audiences segmented by geography, but also to advertisers in regulated sectors who must abide by local regulations regarding alcohol, gambling, tobacco, pharmaceutical, financial services, and more.

Rights, Streaming, and the Road Ahead

AI's impact on live sports is beginning to attract attention, but first it must overcome a complex rights landscape predicated on old business models. Yet the landscape for sports media rights has already been transformed by streaming — which is shaking up cable as consumers cut the cord, and opening the door for Big Tech and its vaunted powers of transformation and disruption to shake things up.

Teams are going directly to the fans, with both the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz introducing their own in-market streaming services — an indication the change is happening and opening the door for new technologies to further monetize the one thing that can't be faked and which doesn't “scale” according to Moore's Law: a sports fan's time and attention.

For game studios, the historical pitch for in-game advertising has always come with a tax: integrate an SDK, expose new APIs, ship a patch, certify it again. For most major titles, that cost rules the conversation out before it starts.

4D Sight's approach inverts the model. Rather than placing ads inside the game, the platform inserts them inside the broadcast of the game — the stream that reaches viewers on Twitch, YouTube, Kick, and other platforms. The game itself is never modified.

How It Works

The system ingests the broadcast feed and runs frame-by-frame computer vision to identify scene-safe placement zones — surfaces in the rendered environment where a brand placement reads as natural to the viewer. These zones are tracked in real time, and rendered overlays are composited into the outbound stream before it reaches the CDN.

• No SDK. Studios don't ship anything new, certify anything new, or accept any new dependency.
• No engine access. The pipeline operates entirely on the broadcast layer.
• Region-aware. Different audiences can see different sponsors on the same gameplay.
• Fully measurable. Pixel-count, viewability duration, and scene context are reported on every impression.

"The game team's deliverable is the game. Our deliverable is the monetized stream. Keeping those concerns separate is what unlocks scale."

The approach is currently active across multiple top-tier esports broadcasts and is in pilot with publisher-owned streaming destinations for live tournament play.