Every Premier League match is broadcast internationally, but UK fans are blacked out from all 3pm Saturday fixtures. The Blackout is built for that moment.

An open source experiment in real-time AI orchestration that turns live football matches into literary audiobooks — match events narrated in a chosen fictional voice, interwoven with club history, rivalry mythology, and player storytelling, delivered with AI-generated illustrations timed to the drama, shared simultaneously in a live social room.

The gaps between events carry the depth: club mythology, player arcs, cultural identity. The result is closer to a live literary event than a football app.

Building a community

Every broadcast is shaped by the people behind it. The platform is designed to support a range of creative contributions — some broadcasts might pair deep factual research with a fictional character narrator that brings personality to the material, while others might carry the voice of a writer who wants the narrative to sound like them, their perspective and feeling for the game woven directly into the experience.

If you have deep knowledge of a club — its history, its culture, what a specific rivalry means to the people who live it — that research can become the backbone of a broadcast. If you write about football and want your voice to reach people in a new way, the platform is built to honour that. And if you are an engineer interested in real-time AI orchestration, the codebase is open source.

Where it is now

The Blackout is in active prototype development. The core pipeline is taking shape — match events, narrative generation, and text-to-speech are working end to end. The next focus is orchestration and presentation quality.

The project is built with a product engineering mindset — every feature starts with an assumption and a success criterion, and product decisions are recorded publicly as the build progresses.

If any of this sounds interesting, get in touch at editorial@theblackout.football.