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i only learned about the NHL board ads situation yesterday but it is by far the funniest fuck up from a sports organization since the glowing puck.
broadcasts are overlaying custom localized ads onto the entire length of the boards surrounding the hockey rink, basically trying to chroma key them in behind the players, on top of existing ads that are physically printed on the boards, and
A) when it works, it is unbelievably distracting and makes the game basically impossible to follow. the ads are full of motion graphics that turn the playfield into visual static
B) it doesn't fucking work.
unsurprisingly, this level of on the fly matte trickery is beyond existing technology, so it just constantly glitches out, players disappear behind the ads or completely off the field, the ads flicker between the digital overlay and the print reality, and the overlay lags behind camera movement.
anyone with their head on could have told you this would never work, and we can be assured that it didn't work when tested, but because literally every executive at every company in the world sees advertising as free money that they are entitled to, the idea that they were not physically able to put ads on a surface that they had realized was not currently returning the maximum theoretical possible revenue was rejected out of hand.
modern business assholes apply the "time to lean, time to clean" principle to everything they can see, attempting to milk revenue out of every imaginable crevice and crack in every single thing they touch, and if something isn't directly returning profit at all times, they start looking for ways to get rid of it. they couldn't get rid of the rink, or the boards, so they plastered ads all over them, but even that wasn't enough, it wasn't generating even more revenue month after month, and they couldn't find anywhere else to shove even more ads into the game so they had to figure out how to put ads on top of the existing ads. these people are out of their fucking minds
supcat mentioned that the company that made the glowing puck, Sportsvision, went on to make the far more successful 1st and Ten. That's the system that displays the yellow line on the football field during broadcasts indicating where first down is, and it's been in use now for over 20 years. It works a hell of a lot better than the shit they're doing with the hockey ads, and that's because what it's doing isn't completely goddamn asinine
the hockey ads demand a system that can dynamically locate the borders of a thin band on screen that's mostly white except for the ads it's printed with in the real world. It then has to replace those ads, while effectively chroma keying the players in front of it.
The boards are white, the ice just below them is white, and the players wear partially white outfits. Anybody with the least bit of sense, not even any knowledge about the technology in question, would tell you without hesitating that this is an impossible situation where the best you can hope for is a 70% reliable solution, which is in fact what they're getting.
1st and Ten draws a single stripe across the picture, and its only requirement is to place the players in front of that - in a game that's played on top of a meticulously maintained, extremely consistent green field (you might even call it a green screen) which is nowhere close to the hue of most of the players uniforms. Even if there is bleed into a uniform, the line is so thin and action is so fast that it would never be noticed.
Whoever had to do the hockey ads got a raw deal.
