A Second Look at OZ's EIC Accelerator AI Sports Broadcasting

A live football broadcast at the top level needs an outside broadcast truck and more than a dozen people at the ground. OZ, a Reykjavík software company, set out to replace them with robot cameras that an AI steers and a single director runs from anywhere. The European Commission picked it in the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, where OZ EHF is the only company listed for the project. The grant for OZeye was €2,393,415.50, 70% of a €3,419,165 budget, for a project that ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021, according to CORDIS.

Seven years after the award the company is still trading, and its system is in use. The clearest record of how it performs, though, comes from its biggest home customer: the minutes of Icelandic Top Football (ÍTF), the clubs' association that runs the country's top two divisions, show complaints about quality, a contract cut from 13 venues to 3, and a second contract torn up.

Where OZ Stands Now

OZ ehf. is a registered, active company. The Icelandic company register at Skatturinn shows annual accounts filed every year, most recently for 2025 on 29 August 2026, and new notices to the register in December 2025. The register also records the company's names: IPTV ehf. until 2011, OZ ehf. from 2012, IPTV ehf. again on the 2021 accounts, OZ Sports ehf. on the 2022 to 2024 accounts, and OZ ehf. again on the 2025 accounts. The accounts themselves are sold by the register and are not covered in the press, so revenue, losses and staff numbers could not be verified.

The company markets itself as OZ Sports, with a website dated 2026 that sells "production-as-a-service": OZ installs camera enclosures permanently at a ground and delivers a finished programme feed for a subscription of 12 to 36 months. Its newest dated news item is from February 2025, when Comcast NBCUniversal selected OZ as one of 10 companies, from more than 1,600 applicants, for its six-month SportsTech accelerator, a selection OZ announced the same day.

The Technology: A Broadcast Crew in Software

In a January 2019 interview with mbl.is, Guðjón Már Guðjónsson described the pivot. OZ had launched a streaming service in 2012 that let viewers control their own TV schedule, but rights issues and low income made it a hard market, and its free OZ app was to close at the end of that month. A little over two years earlier the company had turned to live sports production instead. It had robot-controlled 4K UHD cameras built, three or more per stadium, steered by a director who could sit anywhere in the world, with an AI that Guðjón compared to the software Tesla uses to detect pedestrians, retrained to find players and events such as throw-ins and penalties. OZ would install the cameras at its own cost and earn its money from rights deals with leagues.

The established alternative is the outside broadcast van with a full crew, which the CORDIS Phase 1 summary priced at up to €60,000 per match and said leaves about 90% of competitions without coverage. OZ claimed cost savings of 90% in the Phase 2 proposal, 95% in Phase 1, and "up to 90%" on its website today. By April 2023 the product had a name, OZ Smart Stadium: six 4K UHD cameras with zoom lenses, stabilisers, automatic camera control, directional microphones and AI production software, which OZ said had already been used for more than 300 matches abroad in cooperation with FIFA, according to its announcement reported by mbl.is and Vísir. The FIFA figure is OZ's own and could not be checked against a FIFA source.

OZ is not alone. Automated cameras are a crowded field, and in Iceland the main competitor is Spiideo, a Swedish company founded in 2012 whose cameras were extended to all 22 teams of the men's and women's top divisions in August 2023, according to Spiideo.

What OZeye Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

OZeye was OZ's second EU grant under the same name: a Phase 1 feasibility study of €50,000 ran from November 2018 to February 2019. For Phase 2 the company promised a platform that would control camera robots remotely, produce football without a crew in 4K/UHD, and add an augmented reality layer to recreate the atmosphere of a live match for fans on their phones. It aimed at the "at least 11,900 European clubs" that never get broadcast, and projected that by the fourth year of sales OZeye would be installed at 907 venues in more than 60 leagues, with revenue of €84,436,000 and 138 new jobs.

The final periodic report on CORDIS, for October 2020 to September 2021, says OZ built semi-automatic labelling tools and "a prototype of a fully working pipeline", from perception to camera control and production, made its first installation in a football league and was entering a cooperation with the rights holders of the Icelandic top league. CORDIS lists no deliverables or publications for the project. A CORDIS results article from 2022 describes the "OZ Connected Stadium" built on a gaming engine, with avatars and augmented graphics. The fan-engagement side reached the market in May 2020 as OZ Arena, which put virtual supporters and crowd sound into broadcasts of matches played behind closed doors, according to SVG Europe; OZ's current website no longer mentions it.

1. Crewless multi-camera productionDeliveredOZ Smart Stadium in use in Iceland from 2023, per mbl.is and ÍTF minutes.
2. Broadcast quality beyond the state of the artNot achievedÍTF said in May 2024 that recordings from OZ cameras were not of acceptable quality.
3. AR fan experiencePartialOZ Arena launched in 2020; no longer offered on the website.
4. 907 venues, 60+ leaguesNot achieved3 venues in Iceland's second tier in 2025; no venue count published.
5. €84.4M revenue, 138 jobsUnverifiedNo revenue or staff figures public.

The Home League's Verdict

The most detailed public record of OZ in operation is not its own: the board and general meeting minutes that Icelandic Top Football publishes. At its February 2023 general meeting ÍTF reported a new contract with OZ to install recording equipment at every ground of the men's and women's second tier, the Lengjudeild. In April 2023 OZ said the equipment would go into 13 venues that summer. The start was rough: ÍTF's May 2023 newsletter reported problems with internet connections at several grounds and OZ equipment that "has not arrived in the country on time".

At the February 2024 general meeting clubs asked whether the OZ contract could be cancelled, because production had been poor the previous season and the cost was significant. ÍTF's managing director replied that OZ had been the cheapest bidder and that the contract ran to the end of the 2026 season. In May 2024 the board minuted that OZ had let go of the employee who ran the league's media hub, the archive and delivery service it also ran for ÍTF, and handed the work to a company in India that "did not cope with the task at all", and that recordings from OZ cameras were "not of the quality we can accept".

The contract was renegotiated in August 2024. OZ kept 5 grounds in the men's second tier, ÍTF bought Spiideo cameras for the other 7, and the media hub contract with OZ was terminated, according to the board minutes of 16 August 2024; ÍTF's 2025 general meeting listed "took over the media hub and rescinded the contract with OZ" among the year's achievements. In December 2024 OZ was to produce at least 4 grounds in 2025 and 2026; by March 2025 it was 3, at HK, Selfoss and Þróttur, with Spiideo cameras at every ground in the league. The March 2026 board minutes do not mention OZ, and whether it produced matches in the 2026 season could not be verified.

Not every customer is unhappy. The chief executive of ÍTF is quoted on OZ's website saying the partnership created a "desirable" product with standardised, broadcast-quality production, and the website carries a testimonial about remote production of UEFA Under-17 Nations League matches for Iceland's national teams. The quotes are undated.

Investors and Customers Abroad

OZ has never announced the size of a funding round. In March 2021, on being named to Fast Company's list of the World's Most Innovative Companies, Guðjón said OZ was "launching our next major fund-raise", according to the company; no closing was announced. In April 2023 the advisory and investment firm Hamrar Capital Partners and BKP Invest, owned by Bjarni Kristján Þorvarðarson and Ken Peterson, joined the shareholders and Hamrar partner Baldur Stefánsson became chairman, according to Vísir and mbl.is; no amount was given. The register today lists Baldur Gíslason as board member. Viðskiptablaðið has reported that Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill, CCP chief executive Hilmar Veigar Pétursson and Tencent's David Wallerstein are among the investors, and CB Insights also lists Merrill; the size and dates of their stakes are not public. The EIC Fund's list of invested companies does not include OZ, which fits a grant-only award.

Abroad, OZ partnered with the media platform Newsbridge, now Moments Lab, to feed the Icelandic league's matches into a cloud archive in 2022, ingesting up to 10 streams at a time, according to SVG Europe and Moments Lab; ÍTF later took that service back in house. Viðskiptablaðið has also reported a framework agreement with Sky Sports and a first OZ installation at Broadfield Stadium in Crawley, England. The date of that agreement, and how many grounds Sky has equipped since, could not be verified: neither Sky nor OZ's own newsroom has published it.

Why Europe Should Care

The case for OZeye was a European one: most European football, including women's and lower-tier competitions, is never broadcast because production costs too much. Cheaper production is also what the Commission's Media and Audiovisual Action Plan of December 2020 set out to support when it called for investment in the sector's digital transition after the pandemic.

The record shows the need is real, but also that a European rival won most of the work in OZ's home league, even though ÍTF said OZ had been the cheapest bidder in its tender. Spiideo, from Sweden, now covers every ground in Iceland's top two divisions; whether OZ's six-camera system can win on quality where a league wants more than a single automated view is the question its next contracts will answer.

The Verdict

OZ has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements, league minutes and EU project data, linked throughout.