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Comment by madh | Hacker News Reader

What we really need is the ability to choose camera angles. Not really critical for baseball, as baseball is really about the pitcher vs. batter duel--though being able to watch a stellar base-runner lead-off and time the pitcher for a steal would be awesome. Basketball, hockey, football, soccer would all benefit from different angles. The side field view is no where near as compelling as an up and down (video game style) or a "blimp" view for understanding the complexity and beauty that is professional sports at the highest level.

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Unfortunately the problem with implementing this in other sports is the same problem with implementing a centered camera view in baseball - infrastructure.

In order to get the awesome Madden-esque camera views that you describe (at least for outdoor sports), stadiums would need either overhead camera supports or massively zoomed in angles from the ends of the stadiums, and it would be nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent angle between venues.

Until we have lightweight drone type cameras that can be placed at any point of a 3d mapped field...

Imagine the fun of that, you could control the cameras in almost a 3d software setting.

Or maybe one day computer vision will be so good that it can infer any angle/point on a field from multiple inputs.

You can see this sort of thing starting to creep into NFL coverage, I think mostly FOX Sports. They have a number of robotic cameras strung across the field on wires, and they use them to put together some fairly impressive replay scenes, though they can't follow the ball very well with them so you don't see them cut to during live action that often. I'm not sure how you start introducing this to sports like baseball with its non-uniform stadiums and fields, although things like the NBA and NHL seem like great candidates and I am sure you will continue to see this spread. I think ESPN's Axis uses something like it in baseball and basketball already, but that may just be fancy editing/extrapolation with existing angles.

You used to be able to choose among a group of 4 or more camera angles on a couple of the DirecTV sports packages as well, and you likely still can do that. I know NASCAR is deep into that sort of thing, but I am not a fan so I don't know much about it.

Axis does use fancy extrapolation. But yes, with Skycam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skycam) awesome angles are possible. Baseball fields are too large for Skycam and the Skycam would probably interfere with play. For the NBA and NHL, Skycam is really impressive.

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