Sportvision

Sportvision was a private company, launched in January 1998, that provided various television viewing enhancements to a number of different professional sporting events.

[1] Sportvision was co-founded by CEO Bill Squadron, CTO Stan Honey and COO Jerry Gepner, who had all worked together at Fox Sports and its parent company, News Corporation.

The Emmy-award winning technology company introduced numerous groundbreaking innovations for sports broadcast, including the 1st & Ten yellow line for football and the K Zone pitch-tracking system for baseball, both done with ESPN.

By way of background, in 1996, Rick Cavallaro, working for Stan Honey at Etak (then owned by Fox/News America) developed a way to track hockey pucks with a blue halo as seen by television viewers.

Released as the FoxTrax puck, it was not a success but led to the 1998 formation of the Sportvision company and later that year the development of the 1st & Ten computer system, which generates and displays the yellow first down line that a TV viewer sees during a live football broadcast.