Gerard Hall, founder and chairman of Durham, N.C.-based SMT,
isn’t a household name among sports fans. But he and his company have played a
significant role for nearly 30 years in reshaping how sports are presented on
television. The technology company works with every major sports network and
several leagues domestically and abroad. SMT recently acquired rival outfit
Sportvision, best known for innovations such as football’s virtual 1st-and-10
line, in a move that consolidated its power within the industry.
On the advantages of acquiring Sportvision: There is no
denying that Sportvision has changed the way certain sports are presented on
television. At the heart of all these Sportvision innovations are
state-of-the-art core technology components that SMT will repurpose to other
sports and other visualization applications. A slew of next-generation
products, services and solutions in SMT’s pipeline will benefit from the
incorporation of these core Sportvision technology components.
On forthcoming innovation in TV sports production: A big
push will be toward the maximization of computer automation in order to save
production costs. Automation will impact camera coverage, director line cuts,
replay workflow, insight analysis and performance analytics. It’s not too
farfetched to imagine a 100 percent automated production of a sporting event.
On the continued advance in player tracking technology:
Tracking objects 10, 15 or 30 times a second produces an exponential explosion
of data. Harnessing this firehose of data and creatively applying it is the
current challenge. Data growth must be offset by corresponding logarithmic data
reduction to make the data manageable and meaningful. Player tracking data will
move sports and sports coverage into a world of “Moneyball” on steroids.
On the rise of 4K resolution technology: 4K and higher
resolutions create a very immersive viewer experience since the increase in
pixels create a greater perceived depth of field, and will pay off the promise
of what 3-D should have been.
On challenges facing sports TV production: As eyeballs
become divided across 500 channels, and even more significantly, as eyeballs
are subjected to the constant distraction and interruption by mobile phone
screens and social media, the traditional flow of a sports telecast will need
to adapt. On the production side, less eyeballs means less budget. All
productions will be looking for cost-cutting efficiencies, and these cuts will
be significant.
— Eric Fisher