Live Sports is undoubtedly the most competitive form of television broadcast. Sports and channels have always had to compete for viewers and find new and innovative ways to attract, engage and retain them. It is the live sports broadcast arena that drives the relentless pursuit of improvements in almost every aspect of production; superior image quality, high speed capture to deliver super smooth slow motion, wire cams, miniaturized cameras. elegant instant replay, the list is long. When it comes to production, graphics has long been a key tool, both in the delivery of in-game statistics, and in ways to enhance and augment pre-game, half-time and post-game analysis.

For many sports the use of real-time statistical data has become an inherent part of the fan experience. Whether it is car data and race statistics in motor racing, tracking player speeds and performance, or helping to analyze tactics and plays, live sports and data driven graphics are now synonymous.

This series combines research and expert interviews to explore two distinct aspects of sports graphics production; Part 1 looks at how real time data is captured, processed, distributed and fed into graphics packages to deliver visualizations

Part 2 will look at how sports has embraced Virtual Production and Augmented Reality, the challenges of designing for live production and operational demands in the heat of the live production studio.

Part 1 is available to download below now.

Part 2 is available to download here.

Part 1 - Data Driven Visualization

Part 1 is a free PDF download which contains four original articles:

Article 1 : Data Sources For Live Sports Graphics
The first step in data driven sports graphics production is gathering the data itself. The nature of that data can vary dramatically from sport to sport. Here we discuss some of the data gathering technology and techniques required.

Article 2 : How Data-Driven Sports Graphics Drive Audience Engagement
Our partner Vizrt share how AI powered data driven visualization with Vizrt tools is creating compelling storytelling and generating vital audience engagement and revived revenue via social channels.

Article 3 : Sports Data Management
Those who work with data driven systems know that reliably acquiring data is only part of the battle - data is often not in the right format and needs to be delivered for use structured in the right way.

Article 4 : Data Driven Visualization In Sports
Here we chart the evolution of data visualization in sports broadcast, examine the technology and workflow and pivotal role of ML in current immersive production techniques.