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People and Pop Culture

Plugged In: Gerard Hall, founder and chairman, SMT

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.


Advances in technology have put the means of sophisticated television production into the hands of a greater number of people. TV production is no longer the domain of a private priesthood of producers. The democratization of TV production is in full swing.


Photo: COURTESY OF SMT

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

SBJ Morning Buzzcast: March 25, 2024

NFL meeting preview; MLB's opening week ad effort and remembering Peter Angelos.

Big Get Jay Wright, March Madness is upon us and ESPN locks up CFP

On this week’s pod, our Big Get is CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jay Wright. The NCAA Championship-winning coach shares his insight with SBJ’s Austin Karp on key hoops issues and why being well dressed is an important part of his success. Also on the show, Poynter Institute senior writer Tom Jones shares who he has up and who is down in sports media. Later, SBJ’s Ben Portnoy talks the latest on ESPN’s CFP extension and who CBS, TNT Sports and ESPN need to make deep runs in the men’s and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

SBJ I Factor: Nana-Yaw Asamoah

SBJ I Factor features an interview with AMB Sports and Entertainment Chief Commercial Office Nana-Yaw Asamoah. Asamoah, who moved over to AMBSE last year after 14 years at the NFL, talks with SBJ’s Ben Fischer about how his role model parents and older sisters pushed him to shrive, how the power of lifelong learning fuels successful people, and why AMBSE was an opportunity he could not pass up. Asamoah is 2021 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards.

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