Title: President and chief technology officer of Sportvision, a leader in sports media technology that develops products and applications that enhance the fan’s experience with the television, Internet and convergence platforms. The company is the inventor of the Emmy Award-winning 1st & Ten virtual first-down line, which will enhance more than 200 games during the 2001 football season.
Background: Prior to co-founding Sportvision in 1998, Mr. Honey was executive VP of technology, worldwide, for News Corp., where he conceived and supervised the development of the FoxTrax hockey puck.
What they do: “We take things that are really important to the game and happen all the time and are hard to see, and we make them easy to see. It’s also nice if we can make it visible to the fan in a way that’s nonobtrusive.”
Recent projects: “This is our first season with NASCAR (and our RACEf/x system). And then the K Zone system, where we track the pitch [in baseball] and show where the strike zone is-that was a system we pioneered with ESPN. We pioneered the TennisTracker system at Wimbledon with Turner, where we track the player and measure reaction times. Then in golf we did a system that allows the commentator to draw on the grass underneath the players so the talent can illustrate the terrain of the green and the key zones the golfer has to play to. So this has been a really productive year.”
Playing it smart: “Some people say, `You guys are dinosaurs, you’re just doing TV stuff.’ And two years ago that was quite a stinging criticism of us; here we were in Silicon Valley working on TV and everybody’s saying, `Why don’t you guys get with it and get on the Internet?’ The fact that we focused on where the money was actually permitted us to get our sensors installed in the TV compounds for the football games, the baseball games, the golf events, the NASCAR races. And now we’re in a really good position to get into the advanced media space as it evolves. And we developed real revenue-revenue we’re awful lucky to have right now.”