Right Place, Right Time: Sony Sports Innovation on the Development of Hawk Replay, Skeletal Tracking

Right place, right time: Sony Sports Innovation on the development of Hawk Replay and skeletal tracking By Heather McLean, Editor

Friday, December 11, 2020 - 09:43

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Hawk-Eye's Every Shot, Every Hole in use at the Augusta Masters 2019

In 2017 Sony created a new internal division, Sony Sports Innovation Group. This encompassed its 2011 acquisitions, the Hawk-Eye Innovations and Pulselive subsidiaries, as well as the Sony Professional production services business, providing production facilities at the time to deliver all live content for the FIFA World Cup 2018 from all venues as general contractor.

While its Media Solutions arm sells kit to broadcasters and content players, the Sports Innovation Group deals more with leagues and clubs, although there is crossover between the two depending on client needs.

In July 2017, David McIntosh was appointed to CFO of Sony Sports Innovation. Working across 20 sports, delivering services in 90 countries at 11,000 events in 500 stadiums, Sony Sports Innovation is at the very heart of sports officiating as well as delivering digital solutions for the world's largest sports federations, leagues and clubs through the creation, development and management of digital platforms, reaching millions of sports fans every day.

Harnessing Sony's leadership in live production and sports technology, this fast-growing business group, including more than 400 staff, is creating transformative new experiences for fans, sporting organisations and media rights holders.

Aggressive sports growth

The plan behind the sports division is to get the best out of the development that goes on in Hawk-Eye Innovations and Pulselive, says McIntosh, who is also CFO at both subsidiaries. He adds: The point of Sony Sports Innovation is really to use that Sony platform to aggressively grow our participation in sports, in sports production and even potentially in sports entertainment, if that's the direction that we want to go in.

During 2020 Sony has fallen back on its strong market position to enable it to keep moving forwards, says McIntosh: A lot of difficulty has come to sports production over the COVID period. Going back to March time, we're a global business and we were starting to look at China closing down and then other countries following suit, which was quite a frightening experience because your businesses is effectively drying up and you're watching it disappear night after night or day after day.

But I think the benefit that we've had is that by being part of the Sony Group, we're still financially very strong and I think that's given us the ability to make better decisions.

Ed Hawke, product director at Hawk-Eye (and with a purely coincidentally matching name), adds: Our business [mostly] disappeared overnight [when live sport ceased], and yet we were able to continue working. We were able to keep all our staff employed.

Right place, right time

Hawk-Eye has been working on the further development of the Emmy Award Winning Every Shot, Every Hole project, a remote clipping product which it first implemented with CBS and Thumbwar at the March 2019 Augusta Masters.

Says Hawke: The things we've been pushing forward on this year luckily span the range of our core technical capabilities.

Every Shot, Every Hole allowed operators who were offsite in Basingstoke in the UK and in Atlanta, Georgia, US, to clip every single shot played during that tournament, resulting in 22,000 shots over four days which were then uploaded to masters.com.

Adds Hawke: I think we'd kind of seen the shift in the industry towards trying to reduce the number of people on site [when we developed that product]. And that's obviously been going on for a few years now, for cost and carbon footprint reasons. People are trying to minimise the number of people they need to deliver live sports.

The next innovation after Every Shot, Every Hole was Every Shot Live, which moved on to provide a live stream of every single golfer. It was used in March this year at The Players Championship in Florida, US, for just one day before the tournament was called off due to the pandemic.

Notes Hawke: It was from that point, really, that we started to pivot that [product] into an instant replay tool for the replay operators.

The Every Shot Live operational room based in Basingstoke, UK

And so we took the model of Every Shot, Every Hole and then looked at expanding the functionality of that so that we can provide a fully remote broadcast replay tool. This new product is called Hawk Replay. That allows replay operators to sit at home in their living room, attired however they desire, delivering instant replay to live sports broadcasts this year. We have been providing that to a couple of major US broadcasters this year, for sports like golf; it's been a case of the right product at the right time.

He adds that the development of this product was driven by engagement from Hawk-Eye's partners who had been using the company for golf broadcasts. Hawke states: They were kind of excited about the idea of that product. So discussions were going on between us and that's when we started to invest time into [Hawk Replay].

Having the break from [live sport because of] coronavirus allowed us to start focusing on that [development] full time, Hawke continues. As sport has started to come back, I think that's actually been really important for the broadcasters as they didn't have to reduce the quality or scope of the production despite needing to keep the number of people onsite to a minimum, because they've got guys sitting at home in Florida providing replays for golf tournaments all around the US using our technology.

Hawke adds it was a case of kismet on the technology side, but also a recognition of where broadca

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