359: Potatoes From the Sky

Will Smith (0:00)

Brad, I have a UI complaint.

Brad Shoemaker (0:01)

Great, hit me.

Will Smith (0:03)

You know, when you're watching the sports on TV.

Brad Shoemaker (0:07)

Theoretically, sure.

Will Smith (0:08)

Yeah, and there's information you want to have that changes based on the sport. So you always want to know the score and which teams are playing, but then if it's baseball, you want to know how many people are on base and how many strikes there are and how many outs there are and how many balls there are and that kind of stuff. If you're watching basketball, you want to know how many fouls each team has in a quarter and you want to know how many timeouts they have left.

Brad Shoemaker (0:34)

Maybe top scorers.

Will Smith (0:36)

Yeah, top scorers is nice to have, but that's like a top right UI thing, not like a main, the WNBA playoffs are happening right now and the Valkyries are playing and because the playoffs, they sell playoff rights separately from regular season rights, so the networks that air the games in the playoffs are different and some of them, like some of these games are on USA, Brad, and you know what they do? They just put the score.

It's the score, the quarter and the time left. That's all that's on the board.

Brad Shoemaker (1:08)

If you were to tell me that sports broadcasting is not one of USA Network's core competencies, I don't think I'd have a hard time believing you, although this might be the first time I've heard anything about USA in like 10 years, I'm almost surprised they still exist.

Will Smith (1:20)

Characters wanted Brad, that's everything you know about USA. No, so okay, NBC is, USA is part of the fine network of NBC Universal products.

Brad Shoemaker (1:30)

Okay, true.

Will Smith (1:31)

I feel like they also had some games on CNBC earlier this year, weirdly enough. But anyway, the point is we need to standardize, like this stuff, there needs to be like an IEEE ISO standard for what stuff you put on the always on scoreboard, on the TV, because I want to just glance at that and know like, I want state of the game. I want like video game HUD design on my sports watching.

Brad Shoemaker (2:00)

Should make it customizable.

Will Smith (2:02)

Yeah, why not have a YAML file that you can update on your own?

Brad Shoemaker (2:06)

Yeah, just give it a video game style gameplay option screen where you get to tweak the UI and like.

Will Smith (2:11)

God, that's next level.

Brad Shoemaker (2:12)

You could make it dynamic. You could make it a dynamic UI where it only over fades out so you can see the whole court.

Will Smith (2:18)

Yeah.

Brad Shoemaker (2:18)

Except when like somebody scores and then the score pops like fades back into view.

Will Smith (2:22)

And what if you could give it like the full wow plug it? Well, okay, so you know about the thing that they're doing with the motion cameras now, right? I want to say this is for football mostly, but I feel like some men's basketball games get it.

Brad Shoemaker (2:33)

So ironically, I've been sitting here waiting to ask if basketball has been doing any cool high-tech broadcast stuff, because it seems like football gets all of the toys, like the camera on wire over the field and field overlays and all that stuff. But go ahead.

Will Smith (2:47)

Well, so basketball, they don't need the camera on wire because they just put cameras all around the arena. There's like, there's roof. So it's not a problem. They do have, increasingly they have, somebody started putting cameras in weird places a few years ago and now they're having real fun with it. So there's like, there's the camera that's like underneath the goal on the post. Like, it usually looks like a kind of crappy GoPro. It's the basketball analog to that, the camera that's in the little, the things that mark the entrance to the end zone. And then they also now often have one on top that's on like a servo that tilts up and down above the backboard facing down.

But yeah, and then there's like top down cameras and all that kind of stuff.

The big one for me is that they're doing motion tracking. I can't remember where I saw this, but I think it was one of the men's games last year had motion tracking and they were like getting limb placement and inferring limb placement for the players on the court at any given time. By I think just like having a whole buttload of cameras around the edges of the thing and then kind of synthesizing that into a picture, a monkey list of players basically.