Sony hits IBC with new sports kit

The usual enormous array of products will greet visitors to Sony’s equally enormous stand in Hall 12 of the RAI. Among it will be plenty of sports-related equipment, including a wireless 3D camcorder – if they can get the licenses sorted in time.

“We’re working on showing the 3D camcorder, the PD300, operating wirelessly if we can sort out the wireless licensing for the RAI, if not we’ll just show it as a concept,” says Mark Grinyer, Head of Live Production Business Development- 3D and Sports for Sony Professional. “We’re pretty excited about that. It will enable people to have Steadicam as 3D rather than 2D converted.

“We’re also showing more of a concept exhibit, which will be the MPE boxes in the Stitch mode in what we’re calling Data Augmented Video configuration,” he continues. “Basically, we’re taking on board tracking data either from Stats, who is doing football tracking, or Hawkeye who is doing tennis tracking, and then using that data for high speed telestration within the virtualised camera space. We can overlay that data as well with player tracks, offsides, shots across the court and so on.”

The company is setting up two demos on the show floor, one for each sport, and is after feedback from broadcasters about exactly what features they think will be useful to convey the narratives of the games to the viewers. “We can go away and build 100 features, but there’s no point doing that if they don’t include the key feature that everyone wants,” Grinyer says.