?Player Pointer? on Fox Sports

Player Pointer on Fox Sports 24 January 2013

On the current NFL season, Fox Sports viewers have been treated to an assortment of impressive new enhancement tools that have helped bring the live coverage even more to life and bring new insight to viewers on the tactics behind the game-play and enhance the story telling.

Through Hego s acclaimed Tracab player tracking technology, Fox Sports are now able to select any player on the live game and have a name-strap graphic appear above the player which then follows their movement in real-time. Additionally, as the tracking system knows exactly where each player is on the pitch, statistics relating to distance and speed can also be incorporated into the graphic.

Fox Sports call this brand new capability The Fox Player Pointer and their production crew and commentators are extremely excited about the possibilities it offers in evolving their coverage in the future as they adapt new ways of using the technology to provide even greater insight for their NFL fans.

This is the first use of Hegos world leading Tracab technology in the US and highlights Foxs commitment to constantly innovate their live coverage experience. Fox have commissioned Hego to provide this state-of-the-art technology for both the 2012 and 2013 NFL seasons. It will be deployed on all NFL Fox A games on Sundays and College Football League (NCAA) A games on Saturdays. This represents a total of 40 games during the period.

The Hego Tracab cameras are placed high up in each stadium and connected to Fox s OB truck via fibre interconnect. NFL football stadia provide excellent locations for the cameras and the tracking results obtained are superb. During each game a tagging spotter is located in the stadium where they have a clear view of the field of play. Their job is simply to associate the player numbers with each tracked objects, Tracab then does the rest automatically.

The resultant tracking data is then packaged into an XML UDP stream containing all the X, Y & Z positional information 25 times per second for each and every player on the field. This is then transmitted in real-time to the virtual graphics visualisation system for rendering. Sportvision, provide this element of the solution using the same instrumented cameras already in place for creating their virtual first-down line for Fox.

The solution has been warmly received all round and marks the beginning of an exciting phase in using live tracking data to enhance live sports coverage across many sports in the US. Hego is excited at the prospect of continuing to improve the NFL solution in partnership with Fox and to look for new ways to help bring even greater insight to fans

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