- [Announcer] A turning point in the game.
A Packer blitz forces Dawson to rush his throw.
Willie Wood picks it off
and gallops all the way
to the Chief's five yard line,
where Mike Garrett makes a touchdown saving tackle.
- Every time you watch a sporting event on TV,
what you probably first notice is the glorious,
rousing spectacle playing out in front of your eyes.
But what you can't see is the decades
of tech history hidden beneath it.
From the very beginning,
sports have pushed forward technological developments.
In fact, it was attempts at capturing race horses in motion
in the late 1800s that laid some of the earliest groundwork
for developing movies.
Once TV came onto the scene, the relationship between sports
and technology only accelerated.
- One of the things about football,
if we're talking specifically about television is
that the field lends itself to that medium because
it's more or less the same size as the television screen.
The constant that we've started to see, especially
from like the time of about the mid '60s on is
that these games are made for television,
and the televisual spectacle comes first.
The game itself comes second.
There's always a new little gadget or gizmo.
- One of the most notable early examples
of that was instant replay,
which has now seeped into all kinds of live video.
Legend has it that we have a 1963 Army-Navy football game
and a TV producer named Tony Verna to thank
for instant replay.
Verna directed football games for CBS and was looking
to fill breaks in the action.
Back then, the technology required
for instant replay involved huge tape decks that needed
to be stored in an equally huge truck.
It was no easy feat,
but when the Army quarterback made a touchdown
in the 4th quarter, he was able to get everything together
for what's thought of as TV's first ever instant replay.
Technological developments that were brewing
in other fields made their way into sports only
to be perfected there.
Take the telestrator, AKA that device for drawing
on the screen you always see.
Though it was originally invented in the 1950s
by a physicist,
it was football in the '80s that helped turn it
into the recognizable tool it is now,
used everywhere from medical settings to classrooms.
- Early versions of it were developed
for weather programming and news programming,
but it really kind of took
off as a technology when CBS started using it,
and they unveiled it more or less in I think
it was the 1982 Super Bowl.
Super Bowls have a long tradition of kind
of debuting new technologies because it's trying
to create this sort of spectacular identity for
that media event.
And so, the telestrator is this thing that was used
to kind of help us to understand what was happening
in a replay situation,
that's since been adopted by a whole bunch of other types
of media.
- Along the way, not everything has been so linear though.
Think about one of the most recognizable features
of any football game on TV,
the iconic yellow first down line.
The line made its first TV appearance in a 1998 game
between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Baltimore Ravens.
Though it was new to football viewers at the time,
it emerged from the ashes of another sports tech invention,
the much maligned glow puck.
In the mid '90s, in an attempt to make hockey easier
to watch, Fox Sports unveiled a system for keeping track
of the puck in which a blue glow surrounded it at all times.
- It's a merger of science and sports.
A regulation puck installed with infrared emitters
that sends signals to sensors around the ice rink.
- They had this like weird blue streak that they were using
for a while to kind of help trace the puck,
and the idea was, you know, it was a reasonable one.
The puck is hard to see.
This is before HD television too.
But it didn't work very well, and two,
it was just kind of distracting and people didn't like it.
So, they shelved it.
- But the team of engineers behind the glow puck, however,
left Fox Sports to form a company called Sports Vision,
where they actually would create a major tech breakthrough.
- A lot of it's kind
of trial and error, you know?
Where you have something like the puck thing
that doesn't work, but then you have the first down line,
which is now kind of indispensable, I think,
to the television viewer.
Even if I go to a football game in person,
which doesn't happen too often,
I'm disappointed
that I don't see the first down line.
And I'm also disappointed that when I go to a game
and there aren't instant replays immediately
on the jumbotron, right?
We've kind of been conditioned as a culture
to imagine sports happening in the way that they unfold
on television.
- And to this day,
every time you turn on the TV
you're seeing the echoes of sports innovations even
in the seemingly most innocuous places,
from awards shows to the news.
- You can see other types of programming,
live programming in particular,
trying to borrow certain elements from sports.
You know, a lot of reality television, award shows.
The best example is if you look at news programs.
You know, just watch some cable news for a while
and you can see all sorts of innovations
that were developed specifically for sports.
The ticker on the bottom,
which at ESPN they call that the bottom line, right?
That's a staple of news programming. The rundown column
of different topics that are coming up
that you see on news programming where it will say like,
coronavirus, tax bill, et cetera, et cetera.
That's something that was developed for sports television,
and you see news programming picking this up
and adopting it in their own ways constantly.
And sports took the ticker from Wall Street.
You know, there were tickers that existed
before sports did it,
but they kind of created an aesthetic for it that worked
within their programming.
A lot of these narratives are kind of simplified.
Like I think it was Tony Verna who sort of claims
that he created the instant replay.
That is kind of, sort of true.
It was sort of already in the works by other outlets.
It's never as simple as like, oh,
there's just this one genius who's
in his tower thinking all day,
and he comes up with this great idea
that changes everything.
So, when you have a story,
like the man who created the instant replay,
it's kind of mostly fairytale.
But what does sports television do
if not tell us fairy tales?
So, why not?