Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Stan Honey - Master Innovator, Navigator, Collaborator By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor
Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - 8:00 am
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The 1st & Ten line on football telecasts. K-Zone and pitch-tracking on baseball. Car-tracking pointer graphics on NASCAR. LiveLine course markers on the America's Cup. And anything dubbed augmented reality on sports TV. Today, these elements are fixtures that fans have come to expect in live sports telecasts, but none of the technologies would exist had it not been for Stan Honey. The master innovator and co-founder of Sportvision has helped change the way fans watch sports, creating unique virtual-graphics tools that illuminate hard-to-see moments and allow the production team to better tell the story playing out on the field.
Every time we've created a successful system, it has taken something that is hard to see, important to the game, and occurs often, and then we superimposed a graphic to make it easy to see, he explains. We want to make it easier to see and understand those invisible but important and frequent moments.
Stan Honey
Of course, Honey's achievements go well beyond the realm of sports media. He is one of the most decorated navigators in sailing and, early in his career, pioneered the first-ever GPS vehicle-navigation system.
Stan Honey's influence and legacy in the sports-broadcasting industry is absolutely immense, says Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer and Fox Sports founding President David Hill. What Stan has done - from the glowing puck to the 1st & 10 line to tracking NASCAR [stock cars] in a three-dimensional space - has totally changed the viewer experience. Stan's inventive, curious mind has left an indelible legacy on sports production - both in the U.S. and around the world.
From Navigator and Innovator to the Father of the GPS
The son and grandson of navigators, Honey was born in Pasadena, CA, in 1955, and grew up in San Marino sailing dinghies, as well as showing an early passion for engineering by constructing homemade ham radios. By the time he was a teenager, he was navigating large yachts in races ranging from Mexico to Hawaii.
He opted to attend Yale for his undergraduate degree - largely because it had the best sailing team in the country - and earned a BS in engineering and applied science. While helping Yale continue to dominate the sport, Honey also began to sail professionally and quickly developed a reputation as one of the most gifted navigators around.
After graduating, he began work as a research engineer at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), continuing to sail and navigate professionally as well as earning his MSEE at Stanford. During this period, renowned entrepreneur - and ATARI founder - Nolan Bushnell tapped him to navigate his maxi yacht in the 1983 Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, a race in which he was first to finish. With Bushnell's backing and encouragement, Honey founded Etak (a Polynesian navigational term), which would pioneer the first GPS vehicle-navigation system (Etak technology is still in the TomTom patent portfolio used in many of today's GPS systems).
I think Stan embodies the ultimate marriage between technical innovation and content awareness. And he is the perfect harmony between curiosity and wisdom, says Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer and frequent collaborator Geoffrey Mason. The reason he's so successful at whatever he does is, he makes sure he understands the needs of his colleagues. That has been true whether in his early days as [GPS] innovator, as a navigator in sailing, or creating animations to illustrate the action in an America's Cup race.
Honey's News Corp. Era Begins
In 1989, Honey sold Etak to Rupert Murdoch for roughly $35 million and continued to run it under News Corp. ownership. He also found his way into the media business.
One of the advantages I had going to a liberal-arts school like Yale for an engineering education was that I also learned to speak and write pretty well, says Honey. So the executives [at News Corp.] realized that, even though I was an engineer, I could also explain technology in a way they could understand. At the time, there were a lot of confusing new technologies and terms in the media industry: encryption, digital, internet, conditional access. I ended up spending half my time helping the other chief executives tangoing with these technical issues.
When News Corp. sold Etak to Sony in 1996, Honey stayed on as News Corp.'s EVP of technology, a role he says he struggled with since I enjoy building things and a corporate role like that was really frustrating because I wasn't building anything.
Nonetheless, he took on several major projects during his six years in the role, including launching conditional-access systems for Sky and DirecTV. It was also during this period that Honey first came into contact with Hill.
David and I became friends, and he asked me to have lunch with him every week or so to brief him on the latest in technology, recounts Honey. At one of these lunches, I told Hilly that it was just barely technically possible with the most powerful computers available to compute graphics quickly enough to insert them with correct positioning into live video of the real world. His eyes lit up.
The Glowing Puck: A One-Timer in Sports-TV Innovation
In 1994, Fox Sports had just acquired the rights to the NHL and was looking for unique production elements that could attract new viewers to the property. Hill proposed virtually inserting a glowing light over the puck and a trail behind it.
When we first got hockey, says Hill, the problem that I saw was that you couldn't see the puck. Hockey aficionados would say, Don't be so ridiculous.' But regular folks c
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Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Stan Honey - Master Innovator, Navigator, Collaborator By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor 
