Skycam

• 1. Introduction

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  Skycam is the cable-suspended camera system that gave television sports the look of a video game. It weighs less than 14 kilograms and can move at 13 metres per second, gliding silently through the open air above a playing field while millions of viewers watch from home. Before Skycam existed, every sports broadcast was anchored to the sideline. The game came at you sideways. Then, in fall 1984, a preseason NFL game in San Diego between the Chargers and the 49ers was televised by CBS, and for the first time a camera flew overhead, tethered by cables, looking straight down the line of scrimmage. What made this possible? Who built it? And why did it take another two decades before the technology became routine?

• 2. Garrett Brown's Invention

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  Garrett Brown had already changed how movies looked before he turned his attention to sports arenas. Brown was the inventor of the Steadicam, the gyroscopic shoulder-mounted system that freed handheld cameras from the tremor of the human body. In the early 1980s, he conceived Skycam as a different kind of liberation: not from body movement, but from fixed position. The patent was assigned to Skycam, Inc., the company that would carry the technology forward. The underlying idea was straightforward. Anchor cables at the high corners of a stadium. Run them to a camera spar suspended in mid-air. Drive the whole assembly by computer. But the simplicity of the concept masked the difficulty of execution. Progress after the mid-1980s patent was slow. Computer technology and servo motor technology of that era could not yet deliver the precision the system demanded, and the cost of deploying Skycam was steep. A 2001 estimate placed the price of a single event at thirty thousand dollars.

• 3. How the System Flies

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  Four reels are anchored at the high corners of a stadium or arena. Each reel is a cable spool driven by a 4.5 horsepower motor with disc brakes and its own onboard computer capable of precise positioning. The cable itself is braided Kevlar with a jacketed single-mode optical fiber core and conductive copper elements; a single cable can support 600 pounds. When permanent anchor points are not available, tall extensible lift platforms form the fixed spars instead. At the center of the cable web hangs the spar, a 36-inch-tall unit weighing 45 pounds. It carries a Sony HD camera along with pan and tilt motors, stabilization sensors, a power distribution module, and fiber optic signaling electronics. On the ground, two people share control through a central Linux workstation running custom software. A pilot flies the spar through three-dimensional space. A separate operator handles the camera's pan, tilt, zoom, and focus. The software also manages obstacle avoidance, keeping the fast-moving package clear of goalposts, scoreboards, and the athletes below.

• 4. A Long Road to Routine

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  NBC debuted the first wire-flown remote-controlled camera used in sports coverage at the 1985 Orange Bowl, just months after the CBS debut in San Diego. Yet for the next decade and a half, Skycam remained a curiosity rather than a fixture. Cost was one barrier. Technology was another. The turning point came in the early 2000s. The XFL, which debuted in spring 2001, was one of the first leagues to use the system as a primary camera angle, branding it the "Xcam" in broadcasts. Traditional angles returned to prominence after the first week, but the Xcam stayed in regular rotation for the rest of that season. ESPN followed the same year with its own NFL pre-season telecast, then committed to using Skycam consistently in 2002 for Sunday Night Football. ABC and ESPN eventually extended Skycam coverage to NCAA football, Monday Night Football, and Super Bowl XXXVII. Under the Megacast brand, the networks began offering Skycam-only internet streams of major events. Amazon Prime Video later built its analytics broadcast of Thursday Night Football, called Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats, around the Skycam feed supplemented by real-time statistical graphics.

• 5. The Fog Game and Its Aftermath

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  On the 22nd of October 2017, a dense fog settled over an NFL stadium during an NBC Sunday Night Football broadcast, blocking the traditional sideline cameras almost entirely. NBC had no choice but to lean on Skycam for the majority of the game. Viewer reaction was largely positive, and the comparison that surfaced repeatedly was the default camera angle in video games like the Madden NFL franchise. NBC moved quickly. They announced a deliberate experiment using Skycam as a primary angle for a Thursday-night game on the 16th of November 2017, and again for the game on the 14th of December that year. The tests surfaced a genuine tension in the technology. Skycam's elevated perspective lets viewers watch plays develop across the full width of the field more clearly than a sideline shot. But it distorts vertical distances and makes it hard to judge how many yards separate a ball carrier from the line to gain. NBC's solution for those experiments was to switch to a sideline camera in short-yardage and red zone situations, where precise distance matters most. They also tested an on-field graphic called the "green zone," which darkened the turf between the line of scrimmage and the first-down marker to compensate for the depth distortion.

• 6. Incidents and Near Misses

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  The 2011 Insight Bowl on the 30th of December 2011 produced one of the most alarming moments in Skycam's history. With 2 minutes and 22 seconds left in the game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Oklahoma Sooners, the camera crashed onto the field, narrowly missing Iowa receiver Marvin McNutt. Officials delayed the game for about five minutes while crews cleared the camera and its cables. Two years later, at the 2013 Coca-Cola 600 for the NASCAR Cup Series on the 27th of May 2013, a Fox Skycam cable snapped and fell onto the racetrack. Ten fans were injured and multiple racecars were damaged; the race stopped for 27 minutes. The Home Depot Center in Carson, California had its own close call years earlier. Three weeks after MLS first used Skycam for a broadcast there on the 2nd of April 2005, the camera crashed to the field during a match between the LA Galaxy and Chivas USA on the 23rd of April 2005, turning what had been a celebrated debut into a safety controversy. Even before competition began, the system had a near miss at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where Skycam passed its test runs at the LA Coliseum with excellent images, only to snag one of its four support wires on a steel football goal post on its final test and bend one of the arms. Skycam itself was unharmed, but it was not used at the Games. The most recent significant incident came on the 6th of November 2022, during a Week 9 game between the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets at MetLife Stadium, when a Skycam cable snapped with 8 minutes and 27 seconds remaining in the third quarter, causing a 12-minute delay.

• 7. Ownership and Legal Battles

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  Skycam, Inc. was acquired by Winnercomm, Inc. in 2004. Five years later, in 2009, Winnercomm itself was absorbed by Outdoor Channel Holdings, Inc., the parent company of the Outdoor Channel. Then in 2013, Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, owner of several sports franchises including the Los Angeles Rams and Denver Nuggets, acquired the Outdoor Channel and with it the Skycam portfolio. That acquisition triggered a federal lawsuit filed by Nic Salomon, the former President of Skycam, who alleged intentional interference with contractual relations. The Northern District of Texas allowed the case to proceed in August 2017. It was dismissed in February 2019, just weeks before a jury trial was scheduled. Salomon appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in March 2019, and in April 2021, the Court of Appeals ruled in Kroenke Sports' favor. The word "Skycam" itself is a registered trademark, though it has long since migrated into informal use as a generic term for any cable-suspended camera system. Competing products like CableCam, invented by Jim Rodnunsky and also now a subsidiary of Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, alongside Spidercam and Robycam 3D, all operate in the same space. Sporting Kansas City marked one measure of how embedded the technology had become when, on the 2nd of April 2016, they installed the league's first semi-permanent Skycam at Children's Mercy Park for a match against Real Salt Lake.