Sportvision

» see sportvision.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 27 September 1998, during ESPN's coverage of a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Baltimore Ravens, a yellow line appeared across the field marking where the next first down was. It had not been painted there. Nobody in the stadium could see it. Within a few seasons it was on every football broadcast in North America and had become so ordinary that watching a game without it felt like a fault in the picture.

Sportvision launched in January 1998, eight months before that broadcast, founded by Bill Squadron as chief executive with Stan Honey as chief technologist and Jerry Gepner running operations. All of them had been at Fox Sports, and Honey had come to that job from Etak, the car navigation company News Corporation owned, which is where the underlying math came from.

The company spent the next eighteen years doing the same trick on other sports. For ESPN it drew the strike zone, as K Zone, and then built PITCHf/x, which measured and plotted every pitch thrown in Major League Baseball until Statcast replaced it in 2017. An entire generation of baseball statistics was collected by one private company's camera rig. NASCAR got RACEf/x, which hung a virtual flag over each car so you could tell who was who at two hundred miles an hour.

~ the dossier ~

~ the puck that glowed ~

Before Sportvision existed, the same people built the glowing puck. FoxTrax went on air at the 1996 NHL All-Star Game: a hockey puck sawn in half, packed with infrared emitters and a shock sensor, tracked by cameras whose shutters were synchronized to the pulses, with the data going to a truck full of SGI workstations parked outside the arena. On screen the puck carried a blue glow, and above seventy miles an hour it grew a red comet tail.

The battery lasted about eighteen minutes, so roughly fifty pucks were brought to each game. Hockey fans hated it with a passion that has not really faded. A 2002 ESPN reader poll ranked it sixth among the worst innovations in sport, and Greg Wyshynski wrote that it looked like hockey by way of a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers production budget. Fox's own research claimed ten out of ten respondents liked the new puck. It was last used in the first game of the 1998 Stanley Cup Finals, and when the NHL's broadcast rights moved to ABC that August it was not brought back.

~ what the line actually is ~

I read the 1st and Ten specification the way a computer vision engineer reads anything from 1998, which is with a certain amount of embarrassment. A three-dimensional model of the field is built before the game and reused for most of the season. Encoders on the broadcast cameras report where each one is pointing and how far it is zoomed, thirty or more times a second, with one computer handling each camera. An enhanced chroma key then decides which pixels are grass and which are a player's leg, so the line is drawn under the players instead of over them.

That is live camera pose estimation with real-time compositing, running on 1998 hardware, outdoors in changing light, with no tolerance for a single bad frame because a national audience is watching it happen. We call this augmented reality now and we give talks about how hard it is. It was on air in September 1998.

A competitor called PVI put its own version on CBS on Thanksgiving Day the same year. Sportvision sued in October 1999 and the two settled in 2002 with a cross-licensing deal, which is how the line ended up on everyone's broadcast rather than just one network's.

~ author: no one ~

SMT, another sports broadcast graphics company, bought Sportvision in a deal finalized on 4 October 2016. The technology did not die with the deal. The yellow line is still there every Sunday, and the pitch tracking that PITCHf/x started runs today under a different name.

The company name went, though. sportvision.com still answers, with 336 bytes of HTML containing a meta refresh to smt.com and nothing else. In the head of that file, where the author tag goes, somebody typed the words no one. Eighteen years of inventing the way sport looks on television, and the last thing anybody wrote under that name was a redirect signed by nobody.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »