In the last year, Sportvision took two whimsical ideas from ESPN’s Jed Drake on how to jazz up the network’s NASCAR and Major League Baseball coverage, and turned them into products that are changing the way fans watch those sports.
Keeps pushing the technology window to enhance the way consumers view sports, from baseball to soccer.
A regular geek squad for networks, taking ideas and applying science to make them a reality.
Drake dreamed up one of those ideas — finding a way to allow viewers to see the effect of drafting on race cars — 10 years ago. But it wasn’t until ESPN returned to NASCAR coverage in 2006, and Sportvision engineers combined “computational fluid dynamics,” GPS tracking of stock cars and other technology, that Draft Track was born.
Sportvision completed Draft Track in time for the opening of ESPN’s NASCAR Nextel Cup coverage last July, using graphics displaying orange, green and blue flames to show viewers how drivers relied on drafting during the Allstate 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“One of the most important facets of Sportvision is they have the ability to understand production people in our language and then translate it into a completely different language, which is a technical language. That’s not an easy translation,” said Drake, ESPN senior vice president and executive producer.
Sportvision began working on another Drake brainchild — finding a way to allow viewers to see the trajectory and speed of a baseball pitch in real time — in December 2006. The offerings became part of ESPN’s K Zone, which has become a staple of the network’s baseball coverage.
ESPN also debuted KickTrax — a new Sportvision product that displays the arc and speed of soccer balls — during its Major League Soccer coverage in April.
Sportvision began turning heads in the sports TV business in 1998 with the debut of its virtual first-down line on football fields. Today, it supplies technology to all major U.S. networks.
Turner Sports rolled out Sportvision’s virtual Leadoff Line during its coverage of MLB’s League Championship Series last fall. The graphic displays how many feet base runners are standing from the bag.
“They [Sportvision] are on the edge of technology and bringing the consumer exactly what they want in order to watch different angles to enhance the telecast in ways that have never been done before,” said Lenny Daniels, senior vice president of sports production and new media at Turner Sports New Media Group.
