Yesterday I was surfing through channels on television and came across a Major League Baseball (MLB) game on FOX Sports. The standard camera angle from behind the pitcher that shows the batter at home plate showed no fans in the most expensive seats in the stadium behind home plate. However, the batter hit a fly ball to right field, and on the replay I saw a packed section of fans in the seats beyond right field. How strange, I thought, that the stadium would limit attendance and not spread out the fans so they could socially distance. Then in another angle, all of the seats in the outfield were empty—what happened to those fans in right field? Surely the views of the empty stadium must be the correct representation of reality. I suspected that computer technology was used to populate the fans. But why does the audio sound like there is a stadium full of fans? Surely that must have been made up too because the crowd didn’t seem to react as they normally would to balls, strikes, hits, and outs.
As strange as it seemed to me, this was planned and announced by FOX Sports on 7/23/2020:
No fans? Not on FOX Sports.
— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 23, 2020
Thousands of virtual fans will attend FOX’s MLB games this Saturday. pic.twitter.com/z9oQU0rYuC
Personally I found it confusing and unsettling to see alternating images of full and empty seats in the broadcast of a single game. I think the technology is pretty cool, but the experience seemed artificial to me, and I would have rather seen empty seats and not heard the artificial crowd noise.
That being said, here are some things that I think are acceptable use of technology during a sports broadcast:
- All sports: instant replays
- Football: 1st and Ten system for virtual first down markers
- Tennis: Hawk-eye line-calling system
- Swimming, track & field, and others: timekeeping system
- Golf: ball flight path tracing
All of the above examples are applications of technology that enhance the viewer’s ability to understand what is happening (or what happened) in the game or to ensure that the sport is being played or called fairly. However, the application of virtual fans crosses the line not just because it is inconsistently implemented (which results in confusion) but more importantly because it does not represent the reality of the situation. It just seems disingenuous to me. More information in this article. Your thoughts?
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