Comment by mrandish

Related but tangential to the article's thesis, I just want to add a technical perspective about NFL football broadcasts from someone with a background in professional live broadcast television production. Due to the massive popularity of televised NFL football (they're >95 of the top 100 most watched programs on television every year), the production budgets for broadcasting games are equally massive.

The result is that NFL game broadcasts are generally the most technically sophisticated live, multi-camera broadcasts in existence. What they manage to do in real-time in front of a live global audience is remarkable, requiring orchestrating a complex ballet of split-second hand-offs between over a hundred production professionals each coordinating their contribution to the broadcast in perfect sync.

From a pure IT perspective, a Super Bowl broadcast relies on a terabit scale, high-reliability IP and power distribution infrastructure that would impress even the most jaded big data center architect - and it's all installed, tested and working on-site in about a week - including fail-over backup generators and multiple data feeds to off-site backup production locations. In the past two years they've even reached the level of switching the entire broadcast from an off-site backup location in the event of a catastrophic failure of the main production truck. That means every raw HD camera feed from wireless sideline handhelds, to pylon cams to multiple Skycams all arriving in sync at 60 fps hundreds of miles away (last year's game used >160 on-site cameras),

Even if you think of the Super Bowl as just some kind of weird 'sport ball thing', it can be interesting to meta-watch how the production is being composed. Every year the Super Bowl is where the best new innovations in live broadcast technology show up first. Every vendor is vying to have their latest toys strutting their new visual magic on the planet's biggest live stage. Last year an obvious standout was 3 new $150,000 Canon 122X zoom lenses (that's insane zoom) with a special new optical block allowing instant switching between normal zoom and film-like shallow depth-of-field.

Those 3 units were the only samples then in existence, hand carried by their engineers from Japan just for the Super Bowl. And I knew the instant one of them popped on the screen because it created a super telephoto zoom showing a quarterback's forehead-to-chin face so close you could see every crease and bead of sweat - from ~100 yds away(!) - all with the beautiful shallow depth of field that is, in any other live broadcast zoom lens, simply impossible. You either get the insane zoom or you get the depth-of-field but not both at once, at the same f-stop. Magic indeed. I have no idea what new, never-seen-before tricks await us in ~10 days, maybe some new Skycam motion control wizardry, or an impossibly small wireless camera giving us a new viewpoint or some new GPU-rendered live CGI incorporating real-time position data from the wireless trackers now in the shoulder pads of all 22 players - but I'm excited to find out!