When viewing sports events, audiences typically focus on specific Regions of Interest (ROIs), such as player faces, jersey numbers, or dynamic objects like the ball. Detecting and tracking these ROIs can enhance the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE). These ROIs frequently shift and change dynamically within a scene, making accurate realtime processing challenging. In Live Streaming manual intervention to track this motion may be impractical, and too expensive for many low-cost operations which frequently make use of locked off cameras. Some automatic solutions exist but rely on multi-camera operation. Addressing these limitations, we present an innovative AI-driven real-time ball detection and tracking solution specifically optimized for live-streamed sports events. In this talk we will describe the architecture and the core technology components. Our system employs advanced convolutional neural networks (CNNs), leveraging the efficiency and accuracy of combined YOLO-SORT models for detection and tracking. We integrate these components into an optimised GPU cloud-based architecture, enabling seamless real-time cropping and digital zoom without disruptive visual artifacts like abrupt camera movements. This intelligent content-aware solution significantly improves the QoE by automatically identifying and continuously tracking the ball, adapting smoothly to its movement in real time. Extensive real-world testing demonstrates our system’s effectiveness across various sports scenarios, consistently achieving frame rates above 30 fps at 1920×1080 resolution on GPU-equipped cloud instances. Our approach not only reduces operational costs but also enhances viewer satisfaction by delivering a visually comfortable and engaging viewing experience. Future extensions of this work include real-time event detection, enabling further personalized and engaging sports viewing experiences. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2025 in London, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this – learn more at https://demuxed.com