Feature: ‘Caddyshack’ revisited at IBC - September 2007  

Phil Savage, Managing Director of SportBusiness, publisher of Sport and Technology, reports from the recent International Broadcast Convention (IBC) gathering in Amsterdam.

After the familiarity of typical sports business meetings, attending the International Broadcast Convention is literally like entering a parallel universe. The words are the same but meanings are completely different and the scale is all but overwhelming.
However, remembering the duty of SportBusiness to bring you the very latest insights from wherever they might arise, we braved the cyber babble and mixed it with the techies. And when we say techie, these guys are so ahead of the technology curve they seem to inhabit a different plane from mere mortals like us.
The good news is that although the technology is moving at a dizzying pace, the end user technology i.e., the eyes and ears of our audiences is not and the show received a welcome reminder of this fact during the debate on IPTV. Gideon Summerfield, managing director of Pioneer Online reminded us that there are very few instances of one technology completely superseding another. Take print for instance.
So, although TV quality pictures and sound over the internet, on mobile devices, via WiFi or DVBH will soon be commonplace, regular broadcast TV has a long way to run. So does this mean we are wrong to worry about leakage onto YouTube or pirated content from Asian websites?  Possibly not, but our response may need to be different from simply trying to protect our content using technology or the courts.

Rodents beware!

The secret is to embrace the natural advantages of whatever technology we are using and play to those strengths. This was well illustrated in a presentation from the technical director of Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, which has perfected surround-sound coverage of the most unlikely sports. The broadcaster’s work with golf has brought TV viewers a completely different audio experience including the whiz of the ball as it flies across the screen, the deep thud of the sandshot and even the previously private conversations between golfer and caddy.
All this has meant putting microphones in some very uncomfortable places with some surprising results. Take the incident where a small rodent on a stick seemed to appear on the green at the 17th only to be on the receiving end of some pretty colourful language and then to be bludgeoned by a club as the golfer missed his putt. Who said technology was supposed to make life easier?

The full version of this article will appear in the October issue of SportBusiness International. See www.sportbusiness.com for details on how to subscribe.

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