Case Study: Sportvision enhances fan experiences and provides new revenue streams  

Sportvision Incorporated, an interactive sports marketing and technology company based in the US is bringing unique solutions to the sports market that provide both an enhanced viewing experience for fans, while also generating new value for sports properties, marketers and media companies, writes Dan Williams, president of US investment advisory and business development firm Imperial Partners.

Telecoms giant Nextel recently announced that it will be paying $700m to sponsor NASCAR’s premier series in perhaps the largest marketing sponsorship deal ever in sports. Nextel will take over the Winston Cup naming rights from RJR.
What is significant about this sponsorship is that it not only highlights the growth of motorsports in the US, but it also demonstrates how far sponsors are willing to go to gain consumer mindshare. But most advertisers and marketers cannot afford to spend such money - so what are they to do?
Sportvision Incorporated, a US-based interactive sports marketing and technology company based in Chicago, California and New York, is bringing unique solutions to the sports market that provide both an enhanced viewing experience for fans, while also generating new value for sports properties, marketers and media companies - without costing them $700m. Why is this important? Because many elements in sports marketing and sponsorship have made it difficult for advertisers to differentiate themselves and gain a piece of the viewer’s mindshare. Take, for example, the growth in personal video recorders (PVRs), which enable viewers to pre-record a sporting event, only to be watched later and to skip over the commercials. Sportvision’s enhancements, such as the popular ‘1st & Ten’ product, which creates the illusion that a yellow line is painted on the field, and that players are crossing it or standing on it, allow marketers to get ‘inside the broadcast’. This not only improves the viewer’s experience, it also draws attention inside the actual game (i.e. marketers do not have to wait until commercials to get the brand in front of the viewer). Last [American] football season, Home Depot took advantage of that opportunity and sponsored the 1st & Ten line on Turner Sports college football broadcasts. As part of the sponsorship, the Home Depot logo would appear on the field underneath the players feet and transform into a ‘Home Depot Orange’ 1st & Ten line. This allowed Home Depot to deliver its brand during the telecast and associate itself with an enhancement that 92% of fans say is important to the telecast.
Sportvision’s solutions have been used to enhance hundreds of NBA, NASCAR, NHL, PGA Tour, Major League Baseball, NCAA Basketball and other sporting events including the Olympics, both on-air and online. The company’s six-year deal with NASCAR has brought ground-breaking GPS tracking to motorsports while contributing to NASCAR’s phenomenal ratings growth over the past several years. Sportvision’s Emmy-winning ‘K Zone’ baseball system underscores the potential of the company’s Interactive Virtual Imaging (IVI) capability. The IVI system is also being used by ESPN on Sunday Night Football telecasts and by Turner Sports on its NBA broadcasts.

The Sportvision philosophy

Sportvision’s philosophy has been to develop applications that are not ‘intrusive’ to the sports viewer, but instead stimulate the viewer’s interest and interactivity with a sporting event. By taking this approach, Sportvision has been able to help broadcasters generate additional revenue, provide marketers with new ways to convey their product, while not creating a disruptive element for viewers.
By focusing on preserving the fan experience, Sportvision has created some of the most cutting-edge applications for sports viewers - both in TV broadcast and over the internet. Sportvision in turn enables broadcasters to enhance advertising revenue through these new applications. Some of these viewer enhancements include:

1st & Ten

A winner of multiple Emmy Awards for technical achievement, Sportvision invented the virtual 1st & Ten line, which makes use of the company’s patented video overlay technology to create the illusion that a yellow line is painted on the field, and that players are crossing it or standing on it. The 1st & Ten technology has been used for more than 700 NFL and college football broadcasts since its successful 1998 introduction. In addition, in 2002 Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal cited Sportvision as having created seven of the 27 most important technological innovations in televised sports since the first sports broadcast in 1939.

K Zone

Baseball broadcasts got a whole new look in 2001 as Sportvision and ESPN worked closely to launch K Zone - the first-ever, real-time video presentation of baseball's strike zone. The Emmy-Award winning K Zone is inserted directly into the broadcast video and outlines the strike zone boundaries while also highlighting the position of the ball as it crosses the plate - or misses it. K Zone is extremely accurate, tracking the pitch to within 4/10ths of an inch, and the strike zone is adjusted with every pitch as the batter sets his stance.

RACEf/x

Sportvision’s RACEf/x system has revolutionized motorsports broadcasting. The most complex sports tracking system ever created, RACEf/x uses global positioning system (GPS) satellites to track 43 cars, traveling in excess of 180 MPH, five times per second, creating a complete digital record of the race. Live position and performance data are displayed in conjunction with in-car cameras and also power a breakthrough application in motorsports broadcasts - the ability to add pointers, arrows, and bubbles that move in real-time with the cars to easily identify them for fans at home.

SimulCam

SimulCam technology, powered by Dartfish, superimposes images of one athlete over another creating a ghost athlete effect and can be used to compare the swings of baseball players, golfers and tennis players. During the 2002 Olympics, SimulCam was used to display two skiers simultaneously as they traveled down a run. This allowed fans to see the ‘lines’ taken by the skiers through the gates and to compare their relative performances. Subsequently, Sportvision has created a ‘Ghost Athlete Unit’ to explore new ways to utilise this technology, allowing marketers to sponsor this original offering across sports like baseball, tennis, golf, figure skating and auto racing.

StroMotion

Used during ABC’s broadcast of the 2003 US Figure Skating Championships and at the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, StroMotion is a natural evolution of the innovative sports enhancement Simulcam. Also powered by Dartfish, Stromotion relies on the Simulcam video processing technology to analyse rapid movements so that a moving object is perceived as a series of static images along the object’s trajectory. StroMotion technology was used during TNT’s broadcasts of the NBA All-Star Saturday Slam Dunk Contest in February and TNT’s coverage of the 2003 NBA Playoffs.

Interactive Virtual Imaging

Sportvision’s Interactive Virtual Imaging (IVI) system is the Company’s latest example of marrying state-of-the-art innovation with sports entertainment and information. ESPN is currently using this system in the form of the ‘ESPN Virtual Playbook’, seen on the networks’ Sunday Night Football broadcasts. Virtual Playbook/IVI enables ESPN’s color analyst Joe Theismann to highlight key players using high-tech graphics that, among other things, draw diagrams unobtrusively under the players' feet and provide clear player IDs for viewers to follow, rather than the traditional crayon-type telestrator that draws directly on top of the TV screen.

In addition to Sportvision’s TV broadcast applications, the company has also developed numerous applications for use over the internet. Some of these include:

PitCommand

Working with NASCAR and Turner Sports, Sportvision created the first offering of real-time racecar telemetry and on-track positioning. PitCommand taps into GPS technology sent from a box in every Winston Cup car and pipes an uninterrupted stream of data right to users' computers in real-time - even on a 56K modem. PitCommand offers fans a chance to customise their experience so they can track their favorite drivers and teams by following their RPM, throttle, time behind the leader, lap speeds, laps led, points and braking data. Fans are now able to follow as many or as few cars as they wish during a Winston Cup race.

TOURCast

The TOURCast scoring application was developed by PGA Tour.com in conjunction with IBM and Sportvision. Available exclusively at PGATOUR.com, TOURCast provides unprecedented PGA TOUR tournament coverage of every player, every hole and every shot in real-time or replay. In addition, Sportvision has developed an exciting new companion to TOURCast called ‘Nearest the Flag’, an interactive game whereby fans predict which PGA Tour golfers will hit their tee shots nearest the flag on a predetermined par-three hole during each PGA Tour event.

IceCast

Now available at NHL.com, IceCast is the ultimate live online companion to the television broadcasts of the NHL regular season and Stanley Cup Playoffs, providing hockey fans with a wealth of real-time information to keep them updated on the action whether they are at work or at home. IceCast allows users to customise their experience by choosing from six alerts, such as a visitor goal, home goal or two-minute warning, whereby the user’s internet browser will pop up (if minimised) when the event occurs. IceCast provides its users with a virtual rink where every shot and goal scored in each period is displayed, along with the ability to highlight individual players and track the player’s shots and goals throughout the game.

For information relating to business development and investor relations at Sportvision please contact Dan Williams at + 1 (407) 677-6580; dwilliams@imperialpartners.com.

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