After announcing last week that it had locked in 34 patents for its production technology with another 70-plus applications pending, FOX Sports Lab is now leveraging its innovations to evolve coverage of the US Open, set to tee off on June 13 from Oakmont. Included in its production coverage this year will be its Red Light, Green Light tech showcasing graphic overlays that demonstrate topography of the greens, quality of the shots and “green light all the way” play amongst golfers as well as the use of VR, hole mics in all 18 holes, RF rangefinders to be used from the fairways, fly-over video with graphics and more.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Michael Davies, SVP of Field and Technical Operations and Zac Fields, SVP of Graphic Technology & Integration at FOX Sports to chat about its tech specs, the problems with patents, the US Open and the importance of VR.
Davies on patents: I’ve learned one thing about patents, if you spend $4000, you can really roll those things through very quickly. We’ve been working on the Gopher Cam patent for over eight years, and it was finally just issued a few months ago and of course, it has not only helped us with NASCAR, but also allows us to try things with other sports such as golf. It’s been tweaked a little bit as we’ve evolved. We then spent $4000 expediting the Red Light, Green Light patent, and six months later it was ours.
On the philosophy toward tech: Technology has been in FOX’s DNA since the glowing puck and those types of things when the network was first born. When we looked at it, a few years ago when the FOX Lab concept came out, we realized that we had a lot of technology hanging out there and it made sense to put an umbrella over it. The pipeline isn’t a big organized lab like ESPN used to do, instead it is a lot more nimble and based upon a best of breed of technology partners that we get together with to create these things.
Fields on upgrades at the US Open: We are really focused on building on some of the successful things we had last year. One of the things we really believe is how important the ball tracing is. We equate it to the yellow line marking first downs in football and once viewers have seen that, it is something that they expect. So we are doing a lot of that and adding the functionality of putting yardage markers out there with all those cameras. We’ve really improved that this year. In the fairways, we had two rangefinders last year, but we have created a more nimble version this time around, working with our partners at Protracer, and this time we will have three so we won’t be limited on the number of holes where we can present this perspective.
Davies on lessons learned in VR: We are putting an awful lot of work on VR, and we are excited to bring it back to the US Open. We’ve learned that in order to make live, VR coverage interesting because people aren’t going to be wearing these headsets for long periods of time there are three things we need to deliver. First in quality, it has to look good in broadcast color space, 60 frames per second things like that. The second thing is the importance of short-form and VOD. We are bringing a producer in to handle the virtual reality segments that we are doing. Finally, you need something for the viewer to do. You need interactivity. For the US Open, we’ll be adding some interactivity with options that include allowing viewers to switch from hole to hole, pushing interactive elements out the door, etc.
Hear more from Davies when he joins our VR panel at the Cynopsis Sports Business Summit on June 22, which features a fantastic lineup that also includes Oculus, NextVR, the PGA TOUR and LiveLike. Time is running out so get your tickets today!
