In less than a decade, the way people watch television has evolved more rapidly than during the past fifty years. With newly formed social media habits of viewing 2nd screen apps, catch-up TV and Netflix streamed movies, the rise in time-shift viewing has dramatically altered viewing trends forever. However, there was one noticeable exception to this - sports, where live viewing remained the norm.

Yet now even televised sport, and the way we view it, is undergoing a mammoth revolution, with traditional TV sports broadcasting becoming increasingly under threat. With the recent announcement that social media platform Twitter have agreed a groundbreaking deal to stream Thursday night live NFL games online, is this the beginning of the end of TV sports broadcasting as we know and love it? 

The History of TV Sports

The first broadcasting of sports began with an ice hockey game in 1890, with descriptions of play sent via a telegraph line of the Stanley Cup challenge series between Montreal and Winnipeg. There is debate what followed next, whether it was the first radio broadcast of an ice hockey game in the early 1920's, KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasting a live radio boxing match between Johnny Dundee and Johnny Ray, or was it Professor F.W. Springer, who had a crude set up rigged to transmit University of Minnesota football games to a very small audience as early as 1912.

In the UK, the first sport event broadcast was a Rugby Union international game at Twickenham between England and Wales, in January 1927. Two weeks later the first broadcast of a football match took place, with BBC covering Arsenal against Sheffield United at Highbury. Listeners to the broadcast could use numbered grids published in the Radio Times (below) to figure out which area of the pitch the action was taking place, due to a second commentator reading out grid references during the match. 

The first live TV coverage of a sports event was in the 1936 Summer Olympics at Berlin, televised by two German firms, Telefunken and Fernseh, and broadcast at 180 lines and 25 frames per second.  Four different areas were telecast using three cameras (below).  In total, 72 hours of live transmission went over the airwaves to special viewing booths, called "Public Television Offices" in Berlin and Potsdam. 

It would be one year later when the UK saw its first live televised broadcast of a football match on 16th September 1937, with the BBC showing a specially arranged fixture between Arsenal and the Arsenal Reserves (sounds riveting!) It was only available to handful of homes in close proximity to Alexandra Palace.

In 1938, international football and the FA Cup final were shown live for the first time, with the BBC providing live coverage of England v Scotland, and Huddersfield Town v Preston North End.

The first sporting event televised in the US took place in 1939, showing a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton universities, broadcast by NBC, with the first NFL game also broadcast that same year, when the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Philadelphia Eagles. However, the necessary technology was not yet available for live, coast-to-coast broadcasts across the US, and it wasn't until September 29th, 1951, when a game between the University of Pittsburgh and Duke was broadcast across the entire country.

The 1950 World Cup in Brazil was responsible for a series of ‘firsts’. It was the first tournament since 1938 (due to World War II), it was the first time the World Cup was referred to as the Jules Rimet Trophy, it was the first in which England participated, and it was the first to have television cameras. However, given that the format was in its infancy, no one back in England was actually able to watch any of the games on television. 

In 1954 the World Cup was broadcast live in the UK for the first time, and a year later ITV began broadcasting live matches from the newly-formed European Cup. The BBC also began broadcasting Soccer Special, which showcased matches from the old Division One, but it wouldn't be until 1964 when the BBC broadcast its flagship Match of the Day for the first time. The first match shown was Liverpool v Arsenal. In 1969 Match of the Day broadcast its first game in colour, between Liverpool v West Ham.

 TV Sports Today

The World Cup Italia 90 is credited with changing not just football in England, but also the country itself, after a decade of dark times for English football during the 80's. Fans were dying in stadiums, hooliganism and racism were rife, clubs were banned from playing in European competitions and attendances had fallen. Yet after 1990 football would soon become a sport enjoyed again, and now also by many middle-class people.

As England unexpectedly progressed through the 1990 tournament in Italy, an increasingly gripped nation was glued to the TV, accompanied by Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma (the BBC's choice of theme music.) Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker became household names, and women started taking an interest. Stadiums became much safer and overnight the whole culture of football changed.

In 1992 Sky bought up the rights to Premier League games in a deal worth £304 million, and satellite dishes began appearing on houses up and down the country. In 1999 ITV acquired exclusive live rights to broadcast the Champions League in a deal worth £299 million. By 2009 BBC had acquired shared rights to broadcast live matches from the Championship and the Carling Cup. The UEFA Europa League was introduced and was broadcast by Five, ITV and ESPN. Setanta Sports defaulted on a payment for their 2009/2010 Premier League TV rights and lost their rights to ESPN (Setanta Sports would later go into administration).

In 2010 Sky Sports were the first to broadcast a live Premier League game in 3D. FIFA announced that 25 live games from the 2010 World Cup on TV would be made available for broadcast in 3D. In August 2015, BT Sport launched Europe's first Ultra HD/4K TV channel, and its first live broadcast was Arsenal v Chelsea in the Community Shield. 

From next season, we enter the staggeringly ludicrous £5.136bn contract, after Sky Sports broke the bank to retain the lion’s share of UK television rights, sending shockwaves through the football world when it was first announced back in February last year. To put all that into some kind of perspective, Sky paid a mere £304m for the exclusive live rights to their first five seasons of the Premier League between 1992 and 1997.

Social Media Broadcasts

The Google-owned YouTube was once the only major online video service, so it made perfect sense that the company was also one of the first to experiment with live-streamed sports, in a deal with Major League Baseball in 2013, to livestream two games per day outside the US. The video site also hosted a monthly subscription service for the Ultimate Fighting Championship that same year. And last year, the Canadian Football League live streamed its playoff games on the site outside North America. 

Overall, though, Google’s commitment to live sports has remained sporadic. The reason, of course, is money. “That is completely a business issue,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said at a media conference in 2013. “I can assure you that if you wrote a large enough check for any sports event you wished, you can livestream it globally to everyone.”

The first NFL game to be globally streamed live for free over the internet was on 25th October 2015, via Yahoo.

The Buffalo Bills v Jacksonville Jaguars game in London was available to anyone with a device and an internet connection on Yahoo. It boasted an audience of 15.2 million unique viewers, who watched a cumulative 460 million minutes of the match. It reportedly cost Yahoo a cool $20 million to air, but only attracted average viewership of about 2.4 million people globally. That’s more people than typically livestream the Super Bowl, but far off the television broadcast audience for a typical Sunday game.

More recently, Yahoo announced plans to stream an MLB game every day this season and up to four NHL games each week.

The world’s largest social network hasn’t signed a major deal with a sports league yet, but it’s only a matter of time. The company recently launched a sports-centric section of its site called Sports Stadium, and has increased its focus on live events. This new hub for sports scores, chat and livestreaming has become an obsession for the company. When the NFL said it would sell the streaming rights to Thursday night games, many thought Facebook would be a good fit, but Facebook reportedly withdrew a bid to carry the Thursday NFL games. This was apparently down to the way it would have had to handle commercials, and this didn’t work for the social media network. 

After months of haggling, a winner was finally announced of this historic deal to broadcast Thursday night NFL games live across the web - Twitter, graduating from the second screen, to live-stream ten NFL Thursday Night Football games for free. This NFL deal could help Twitter measure a “total audience,” estimated to include 800 million people, and for the NFL, the agreement represents an attempt to reach fans who have cut their cable subscriptions and are more likely to stream online video.

“Twitter is where live events unfold and is the right partner for the NFL as we take the latest step in serving fans around the world live NFL football,” explained NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. “There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday night football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season. This agreement also provides additional reach for those brands advertising with our broadcast partners.”

The Future

In football, it’s a given that all the action and drama that takes place off the pitch makes each of those 90 minutes on the pitch even more vital. Therefore, social media and messaging platforms are perfectly positioned to capture the hearts and minds of the football-loving audience, whose passion for the game doesn’t fade at the final whistle. They need to be able to continue the conversation long after the match is over. The behaviour of a team or player on social media can directly influence a fan's perception of their team. It has become essential for sports organisations to engage fans and consumers on social media before, during and after the games, to own that moment.

The reach on social media is in many cases far exceeding the TV audience figures, which means rights holders can vastly improve the fan engagement by continually engaging and stimulating the hungry appetite of their audience, and that can be measured and valued as new commercial opportunities with sponsors. Brands involved through sponsorships and social media promotions benefit from increased brand affinity and loyalty. 

Fans want to eat, sleep and drink their passion in lots of different ways, brought directly to them via their preferred screens. Watching the match in a pub on the big screen no longer provides enough satisfaction. A modern fan needs to have the immediacy of the experience delivered to them on the platform of their choice through Facebook Live, or react with fellow fans through messenger apps, or get the feeling of actually being there with Snapchat.

When properly addressed, the strength and direct revenue opportunities opening from social media platforms is limitless for the sports world. Baby steps are occurring. Sure, they have been occurring rather slowly, but this recent news with Twitter and NFL could now start to accelerate and gain the momentum of change.

Technology is advancing at an unstoppable speed, quickly enforcing the decades-old broadcast industry into oblivion. I haven't quite cut the cord yet. I tend to buy more HD movies on Sky, watch catch-up TV rather than when it is scheduled, and own an IPTV box for watching English channels on my TV in Spain. This clever little black box, hooked up via an ethernet cable to the router, and a HDMI cable to the TV, offers just about every channel you can think of, in near HD (let down only by the occasional internet dropout).

Live sports has always been the one area that essentially still relies on good old fashioned live broadcasting. I am a football fan myself (Hull City), and enjoy watching live sports at home and in Spain. But this final, best-reason-to-exist, for broadcasters may soon be over. 

Throughout my lifetime, live sports content has always been delivered to viewers through a live central channel. But with increasing high-bandwidth data networks, mobile devices, smart TV's, etc. anything can now be a network. The traditional broadcast TV paradigm has been on vulnerable ground  for some time, and the shockwave warning signals sent out from this Twitter deal is that the traditional broadcasters are nearing their end. The NFL probably knows it, even if the rest of the world doesn't quite yet. When that end will finally be, no one yet knows...

THE STORY OF TV GRAPHICS

---

History

When television began back in 1936, it brought with it the potential to enhance the visual experience with the possibilities of information graphics. However, the history of graphic design in television is one area which lacked any serious consideration in the early days, resulting in limited resources and under investment for many years.

It was nearly 20 years after the launch of BBC Television, that its first full-time graphic designer was employed, John Sewell, in 1954. This was also the year when the first in-vision weather forecast was broadcast, presented by George Cowling. The visual onscreen maps were drawn by hand in the London Weather Centre, before being couriered across London. They would later be replaced with magnetic symbols in the 70's, computer generated maps in the 80's, to the current high-end 3D graphics powered by MetraWeather's Weatherscape XT.

The Early Years

During this era of black and white TV, the quality of broadcasts and receivers were limited to a resolution of only 405-lines, resulting in pictures suffering from poor definition. Up to 20% of the screen was considered unusable to the graphic designer, due to the lack of focus around the screen’s border, coupled with the fact that different television sets cut the picture off at different points.

Because of this, graphics created for TV had many restrictions. Lettering had to be large and bold, routinely created by sticking white Letraset characters onto black card. Credit rolls were special devices which used long strips of black material onto which the Letraset was stuck, and which were physically rolled, either by an electric motor, but more often than not by hand. Any illustrations to grace the screen in those days had to embrace fairly heavy lines, lacking any fine detail.

The restrictions were, of course obvious. People were needed who could be trusted to check the spelling and achieve a balanced design layout, and one or more cameras had to be allocated to view them, in an era when a studio would never have more than four cameras.

These images above show how news graphics were originally made by hand, using cardboard and celluloid for maps and charts. An embossing machine was used to print the type for captions. The graphics department would look more like a decorators workshop, as these images illustrate...

Graphics on Film

The movie industry was no different in the 1950's. Saul Bass (1920-1996) became the first significant motion graphic designer in these early days, designing the opening title sequences for many popular films such as The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960) among others. Bass was an extremely talented and productive designer, and is commonly cited as being a pioneer in the field of motion graphics. During this period all graphics were created by hand or on film, and were extremely time consuming and expensive to produce.

Introducing the Character Generator

The first electronic device to radically depart from this crude way of creating onscreen graphics was the Riley character generator (CG), developed in association with the BBC, which would later give way to the more successful Aston in the UK (below), and Chyron in the US, where both names became industry standard generic trademarks.

My first role as a graphic operator back in 1996 at Teddington Studios involved using a fairly hefty, robust beast called `Collage' by Pixel Power, yet whenever I was asked to play out a name strap, the director in the gallery would refer to it as an `Aston', or `Name Aston'. This is something that would never really change in the years since my first job in TV. I would go on to work in international sales roles at both Pixel Power and later Vizrt, yet even today I have seen Vizrt name straps (or `supers', which is the correct terminology) still been referred to as `Astons' in many broadcast centres, even with monitor labels in a gallery displaying this trademark name.

The early 3D character generators surfaced in the 90's, using bespoke hardware. Processing power was such that layouts had to be rendered before they could be used, and extended animated sequences were impossible because of memory limitations. The Quantel Paintbox was heavily relied on to create background images and full frame stills (a very fast, easy-to-use, broadcast-friendly version of something like Photoshop.) I remember working at Anglia TV and having to create a news story map by capturing a road atlas under a rostrum camera, and creating an image from it in Paintbox. Hard to believe now, but that's how it was back then.

Launched in 1981, and years ahead of its time, the Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated workstation, primarily used in the production of television graphics

User interfaces also tended to be rather less intuitive than we would expect in today's Windows-driven market, and operators needed an extended period of training. That was actually a major obstacle in the wider use of character generators: there was a shortage of well-trained operators, and once trained on the preferred machine, they tended to resist moving to another manufacturer and using another device.

Today's Graphics

Many of today's graphic operators now have to be 3D designers too, often possessing a whole range of additional skills to their portfolio that were not required back then. Being competent in 3D design to create elaborate and exciting real-time 3D graphical stories (or even virtual sets) is sometimes not enough these days. Having the ability to handle complex datafeeds, integrate to newsroom systems, or to create advanced templates is often expected these days of a freelancer in the market. Many of these designers even come equipped with their own kit, which makes it handy for entertainment shows on limited budgets, who only require a rental model as the production may only be running for a few weeks at a time.

Sports graphics for broadcasters are often farmed out to graphic production companies such as Delta Tre or Alston Elliot, who specialise in providing operational staffing levels, equipment, and design on fixed term contracts to the likes of BT Sport, Sky Sports, ITV and of course BBC, where I experienced this first-hand during my time as Graphic Producer at BBC Sport.

Sky Sports presenter Will Greenwood between head-to-head VR graphics of opposing fly-halves Farrell and Wilkinson

There is also a huge rise in the need for CG graphics in master control. The multi-channel world has created a whole new television concept - channel branding. Where that once meant just a simple bug inserter, now there is a need for more advanced devices, creating sophisticated branding sequences designed to stop the viewer’s finger hitting the remote and keep them loyal to the channel they are watching. 

Credit `squeezeback's' provided here by Pixel Power, wrapping the branding in multiple windows around the end of the programme, are seen by broadcasters as a powerful way of retaining viewers without reducing the amount of commercial time they can sell (not applicable to BBC and EastEnders!)

The Future

As was the case for its history, the future of broadcast graphics depends largely on its medium, the television, which is going through a substantial change at the moment, probably one the biggest changes since its conception. Although advanced 3D computer generated graphics are part of the content viewed on television, newer technologies have made it possible for these graphics to become highly realistic, perhaps shaping the way in which audiences view and interpret content via television and the web.

Through the use of innovative virtual reality and augmented reality technology, graphics have reached another level to engage viewers through quality, visually absorbing live content, seen to great effect on recent election broadcasts, and used weekly on flagship sport programmes like BBC's Match of the Day and Sky Sports Monday Night Football, that rely heavily on graphical content combined with innovation. Virtual studio graphics now sit alongside and are visually-indistinguishable from the physical-set elements, meaning graphics need to look photo-real, and the tracking must be accurate enough so that when cameras move, the rendered virtual graphics would exhibit a seamless blend between reality and virtual.

MotD makes extensive use of the Viz Virtual Studio for augmented reality

Monday Night Football - a design innovation that gave the virtual set an illusion of having a much larger physical set in the studio

As the industry is gearing more towards VOD and OTT, and the next generation of audiences are forming habits of viewing 2nd screen devices on tablets and mobiles while watching TV, this is creating the need for more interactive forms of broadcast graphics. The younger generation are much more engaged, less passive viewers, who need to be entertained through various form of social media and live interaction. 

I was introducing the 2nd screen companion app, and live social media interaction to the industry back in 2011 with never.no, but discovered the technology and concept was slightly ahead of the curve back then. I found programme editors and producers slightly wary of audience-created content being aired on their live shows, and procurement teams not entirely sure what the value of such technology was worth at that time. Obviously this has since changed with production teams, who now recognise the importance of these social media tools to engage more effectively with their audiences. 

Bringing it all together, Chyron is partnering with ConnecTV for its companion app polling technology, Never.no for its social TV platform, Mass Relevance for its real-time curation and Vibes for its text, Twitter and web voting technology

Broadcast graphics will continue to push the envelope when it comes to producing high quality, visually stunning accompaniments to informational television programming, as long as television as we know it still exists. But how long that will be, who knows...

About the Author

I have seen many changes, and been through many different experiences in the broadcast graphics sector since I began working as a CG operator in 1996, which is why I feel well-placed to write and share this blog.  I freelanced as a Paintbox designer and CG operator in the 90's, before heading up a graphics division at Granada TV. This led to an international sales career with Pixel Power, Graphics Producer at BBC Sport, UK Sales Manager for Vizrt, Sales Director for Vizrt India, Business Development for never.no and MetraWeather, and Project Managing the roll-out of Vizrt for BBC Wales.