FIFA, Major League Baseball and Cricket all use a form of Sony’s automation technology.
Transcript:
Conway Gittens: Do you think Major League Baseball is inching closer to incorporating hawk-eye’s technology and automated balls and an automated balls and strike system.
Rufus Hack: I think there is a direction of travel that we’re seeing in all sports. It’s happening in cricket, in tennis, in soccer, in all of the big US sports, where people recognize that at a, at an aggregate view, the technology can make better decisions than individuals or other humans. And so ultimately, there is an ambition from all of the world’s top sports to make their sport quicker, fairer. And more balanced. And so I think the application of these technologies is a direction of travel. And now we need to be very sensitive to that it’s done in an incremental way and that it doesn’t upset the speed of the game or the traditions of the game, or how people fans in particular, really love the passion of the game. But for us, what we’re seeing is a real movement in that direction. I mean, we’ve been doing this through hawk-eye for 20 years. We started doing line calling in tennis 20 years ago. We started doing decision review systems in cricket 18 years ago. This has been a long journey for us where we’ve incremented to introduce automated officiating in lots of sports, and I think we’re now seeing this being really taken up by the US sports. And as I said, we’re having the conversations with the NFL about automated line to game and other applications. We’re having the conversations with the NBA about how they can use it potentially around the goaltending side of things we’re having conversations with hockey around automating offsides. There’s conversations, as you say, with the MLB, around how they think about automated balls and strikes. And for us, this is a direction of travel that sport is moving. We never want to take away the passion of the game and the things that make the game so special. But if technology can play a small part in making the game quicker and fairer then, for us that’s the real privilege for us to play that role.
Conway Gittens: So for you, the slower movement toward this is not really about the argument about retaining human element or the fact that the technology is up to par for you. It’s really about maintaining the integrity of the sport or not getting fans upset.
Rufus Hack: I think, I think it’s a bit of both. I mean, we’re now in a position where we’re able to capture in sub 1 second latency, 29 skeletal parts, body parts on the athlete, which is through no wearables, purely through optical tracking, through having cameras in the stadium. So that technology has come on a lot. And we now have 400 people globally in our products and development teams who are building out computer vision AI and machine learning technology in order to get there. So the technology is coming quickly, but obviously the sport has to be ready for the application of that technology. So we started working with FIFA about eight years ago or so where we introduced it was actually in 2018 World Cup, where we introduced VAR with FIFA, and that was effectively looking to make the process of offsides clearer. But that was actually on a 90 second latency. We then in the ’22 World Cup introduced alongside them semi-automated offside, which was a circa second latency on the offside decisions. We are now working with them about introducing automated offside, which is on a one second delay. So effectively, you can see the increment over the last six to eight years, where the speed of decision making has got quicker, the accuracy has got quicker and we’ve been able to automate a lot of that. And ultimately, I think that’s the journey that a lot of the US sports are now moving on, where they look to automate some of this. But as we said, you really do need to be sensitive to your phrase comment to the integrity of the sport and make sure it matches the product on the field.
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