Scorebars / scoreboard OSGs - history, firsts and lasts

There was a trial on highlights which retained the minute only .. Not sure by who now.

From memory they reverted it back after a few matches. It just didn't sit right at all. I think it's a case of what people are used to. Saying that there's no consistenty with BT's graphics. For the Premier League the clock scorebar sits on the bottom left and for get UEFA Champions League it sits on the top left.

Sega Mega Drive???

I looked into this subject a few years ago. The origin of scorebars is lost in time. Early examples date back to the 1970s produced with captioning machines that were not specifically designed for the purpose. Some machines were intended for use with CCTV systems.

I vaguely remember that MSX computers were used by a few TV channels to produce scorebars and other CGI in the 1980s. Some high-end models had a genlock feature and could superimpose CGI into a video stream. I'm unsure whether any British TV channels used MSX computers but they were definitely used by indie producers in Britain.

The Commodore Amiga had impressive graphics capabilities for its time and also had genlock resulting in it being a very popular platform for CGI in the late 1980s through to the end of the 1990s. Several TV channels in Europe used them for captioning and CGI.

Afaik, even though Champions League broadcasters are not obliged to use a UEFA designed scorebar (unlike Europa League and European Qualifiers broadcasters who are), if BT placed there's in the usual bottom left it would clash with the UEFA lower thirds which they are obliged to use/take.

the Europa League score and clock is obligatory because it's included in the world feed. I'm not sure why that's not the case on the Champions League - and the broadcast manual doesn't mention anything about the style of one that a broadcaster might insert themselves.

You're very kind, but all the info is out there for anyone who thinks it's worth looking for. I'd been watching a lot of football from this era anyway, and it really stands out how much graphics have changed.

About those 1990s BBC graphics, and how rarely they changed... What was the BBC scorebar at Euro 2000, does anyone know? It's something that YouTube didn't answer easily.



Argh, I wasn't being serious! From thinking about it some more, it was probably just Sky's green colours that reminded me of the USA '94 video game colours.

This is all amazing information, thank you:




One change that happened was whether or not the score disappeared after a goal – presumably, in the early days it took them several seconds to update the numbers, so they didn't do it in-vision. ISTR the first time I saw a scoreline change instantly on-screen was on a 1995 ITV game.

1994 World Cup

As mentioned in the OP, The Football Attic has some great info about some of the graphics used at past World Cups and Euros:

http://thefootballattic.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/fifa-world-cup-in-captions-part-1.html (1966-1978)
http://thefootballattic.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/fifa-world-cup-in-captions-part-2.html (1982-1994)
http://thefootballattic.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/fifa-world-cup-in-captions-part-3.html (1998-2010)

http://thefootballattic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/uefa-euros-in-captions.html

The first use of score DOGs in a major tournament was the 1994 World Cup, when ITV tried a new look for the month:


< BBC

This tournament may also have been the first use of scorebars on U.S. television, although ESPN was mainly interested in making sure the score was sponsored by someone, anyone...



Screenshots from Biblio Foot, Cosmin Vlad and sp1873 on Youtube

I think that's because the Champions League branding is so established they don't feel the need to demand everyone uses the same graphics package, whereas they really want to do some heavy brand building with the Europa League. What I don't understand is why it gets taken off during replays.



I think it was the same BBC scoreline we'd grown to know and love during the nineties. Euro 2000 was the end of that era of BBC Sport, when they lost the Premier League in 2001 they had quite a radical revamp - I remember they introduced the new graphics with the very first live match they had after the end of the Premier League season, Greece vs England in June 2001.

I thought that maybe because we all think Sky Sports was first that it was in fact a Fox innovation, but FOX didn't have the FoxBox (their name for the on-screen scorebar) until 1994, so it looks like the UK market was the innovator of the permanent on-screen scorebar.

Has anyone mentioned the early Channel 4 Monday night British basketball games? Dimly remember a scorebar at the top of the screen, with, IIRC, scores picked out in team colours, and possibly a clock too.

Live and Kicking's DOG was done from an Archimedes! They could be genlocked with the right adapter so a fairly easy way to do it. I only know this because it crashed one morning and the RISCOS desktop appeared on top of the output.

In the early days of scorebars they used to be taken off screen to be updated as a goal went in, so as you say probably a general purpose caption generator.

The Archimedes had quite good graphics capabilities and so found some favour within the industry, you had to fit it with an additional genlock card to make it sync with the rest of the kit as you say. I don't think it could output a 'key' signal so you could only luminance key the graphics onto a vision mixer. I wouldn't have put it past the BBC to have developed a parallel key generating channel, i.e. if any of the RGB video signals were above 'zero' a key signal could be generated. Pure speculation on my part.

The graphics for WWTBAM were originally created on Acorn machines - I seem to remember reading that one of the issues using PCs was a lack of broadcast graphics cards, which may explain the preference.