With a lot of complaints from myself and other fans about how TV networks add their own graphics to a sports broadcast during an event, I thought I’d add a few I actually like:
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The box over the strike zone in baseball showing the speed of the pitch. Hopefully this will replace the home plate umpire calling balls and strikes one day.
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The lines showing the line of scrimmage and the first down line. Today I can’t imagine what football must have been like to watch without this.
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The tracer showing the direction of the golf ball after it’s been hit off the tee. At first I found this annoying but the ball is so darn small and hard to see I know appreciate seeing if the golfer hooked or sliced. Still annoyed by the “putting line” graphic——I can tell if the ball is going into the hole without this.
Any others you like? If there’s that annoy the hell out of you, we can talk about that too.
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I like the SkyCam in limited use. It adds dimension to the broadcast, but the time the showed the whole game in Madden view was brutal and I hope that never becomes a thing.
In tennis they have a machine that shows if the ball was in or out complete with graphics for the television audience. That’s been a bit of a game-changer and, if you accept its accuracy (which isn’t universally the case) it makes the game better.
It’s funny, I grew up watching football as a kid, then I went through a long period as a young adult where at first I didn’t watch TV (too poor to have one or one that got more than one channel) then later stopped caring about sports. Then as I got older I went back to football and I recall how amazing it was to see these lines virtually superimposed over the field. It also confused me a bit for half a minute before I realized those lines weren’t actually on the field. (You can tell it had been a long time that I watched a game.)
But sometimes it does feel odd, like I wonder how I could have kept track of the game in the “old days”. I just remember you had to look for the orange flags on the sidelines to figure out where the down markers were. I don’t remember caring too much about the line of scrimmage, personally, as a spectator.
It’s been a while since I’ve had any interest in the America’s Cup yacht races, but some of the graphics is excellent.
Another vote for the first-down line in football broadcasts. It wasn’t necessarily hard to figure out where the first down would be in older broadcasts, but the line does make it a lot easier.
The NFL Network often shows older game broadcasts, and another “gadget” that I really find I miss in the old ones (especially in games from the '80s and before) is the on-screen scoreboard. It’s really nice to be able to see the game clock, the play clock, and the score, especially if you come in while the game is in progress. In games from the 1960s an 1970s, they often wouldn’t show the score, at all, except for when the broadcasts were going into, or coming back from, commercial breaks. That said, in recent years, the networks have added more and more animations to that scoreboard, making it increasingly distracting, but it’s still a big improvement.
I actually kind of liked the first-down line better when the technology wasn’t quite mature, and the line would end up superimposed on the Eagles’ and Packers’ uniforms.