TAG Gives Sports Broadcasters Birds-Eye View Of Content With Support For Sony Hawk-Eye Cameras

TAG Video Systems marks another milestone by adding visualization and monitoring support for Sony’s Hawk-Eye, a high-performance camera used in sports applications with atypical output. TAG, a worldwide provider of 100% SW, 100% IP, 100% COTS/cloud, probing, monitoring and multiviewing solutions for all four of the major broadcast applications (live production, playout, delivery and OTT), says it is the first to offer support for Hawk-Eye on an IP, all software multiviewer.

First used as a broadcast tool to analyze decisions in Cricket, Hawk-Eye has now become an integral part of more than 20 sports covering 20,000 games or events across more than 500 stadiums in over 90 countries in a typical year. The solution provides the tracking and analytic tools required for ball tracking, watching goal lines, line calling and point detection. Hawk-Eye provides officiating, production, video management, broadcast and digital solutions that make games fairer, safer and more engaging for the viewer.

It was not possible, however, to directly achieve visualization and monitoring of Hawk-Eye camera output streams — which are not a typical 4K source — on an all-software IP multiviewer until TAG integrated support into its IP-based MCM-9000.  This unique functionality provides full visualization of the content along with all other sources for display on the multiviewer mosaic output, which combined with TAG’s integrated probing and monitoring ensure signal quality, health and integrity prior to feeding the Hawk-Eye vision processing system.

“Sony’s Hawk-Eye camera is immensely popular with sports broadcasters because of its optical tracking system and vision-processing technology that enable extremely accurate live ball and player tracking with full-field coverage,” said Paul Briscoe, TAG’s chief architect. “Previously, however, there was no way to directly view the camera’s output stream on an IP Multiviewer, but TAG is happy to announce that our MCM-9000 multiviewer can now display them along with other sources on the same Mosaic output.”