Scorebars / scoreboard OSGs - history, firsts and lasts

Scorebars in the U.S.

There's quite a good article about American TV graphics in the New York Times . It covers some stuff already mentioned in this thead – like the 1994 World Cup, when the home broadcasters put scoreboards on the screen, maybe for the first time in the U.S.:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/sports/the-tv-score-box-that-grew-and-grew.html





I suspect that this may not be the earliest use of scorebars on American television. With so many stations, big and small, it wouldn't be surprising if someone else had experimented with something similar. (As C4 did in the UK.)

The "Fox Box" wasn't groundbreaking. It wasn't even the first scorebar on American television. It was introduced in 1994, two months after ESPN's soccer scorebar, two years after Sky's, and eleven years after Channel 4's basketball scoreboard.

So, why even mention it? Well, it might be the most expensive scorebar in history: it cost $395 million a year for Fox to put that graphic on the screen. (Admittedly, they also got a few American football games included in that price.) Just like Sky buying the Premier League rights, Fox's deal with the NFL changed the sport off the field, and on-screen. The situations are very similar – in fact, some of the same people were involved at Sky and Fox. With the score graphics, David Hill was responsible in both cases.

NFL American football coverage already contained quite a lot of graphics. In the 1970s and '80s, it was common to display every down (e.g. "1st and 10") at the foot of the screen, and other information between each play. Fox continued this, but added a scoreboard with a clock, in the top-left of the screen.

In week 1 of the 1994 season, Fox showed six games in different regions. From the one game that's available to view, it looks like they tried to bring in the "Fox Box" stealthily, without scaring the horses... not easy when you're having technical issues.

The scorebar didn't appear in the first 15 minutes of the game broadcast. That may have been intentional, as it was still 0-0. Soon after the first touchdown, the scorebar appeared, but only as white text and outlines, too thin to read easily. Secondly, a solid black background was added to the score, but the clock disappeared. Then finally, the background changed to grey shading, with the graphics eventually all returning.

Philadelphia Eagles at New York Giants, NFL, 04.09.1994



The scoreboard remained, with the grey background, in week 2 and 3 of the season, and became a fixture of Fox's NFL coverage.



The name "Fox Box" was already established, appearing in a Washington Post article in 1994 when Fox started showing the NFL. According to the NY Times article above, scorebars were later adopted by ESPN in the same sport, and Fox on baseball in 1995.

Their scoreboards nowadays are bigger and full of information, some of it useful. And during a live match there's even a second scorebar in case you need updates from other games, including games in different sports. Sadly they've not yet added a news ticker, stock market data, and your Twitter feed, but give them time. This article covers Fox's different NFL designs from 2014 back to 1994:

http://awfulannouncing.com/2014/the-evolution-of-the-nfl-on-fox-score-bug.html
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Interesting that American football scorebars were originally essentially similar to those in other team sports, and that the additional data now more typically present (down and distance, timeouts remaining, who has the ball) only came along much later.

Sky's and BT Sport's broadcasts of US sports incidentally mercifully usually spare us the second scorebar (or ticker rather), unless you're watching NFL Redzone.

Depends on the source material. eg when I watch SF Giants games on MLB.TV, there's no ticker bar from ComcastSportsNet Bay Area, but when BT take the home feed on SF Giants games, there is.

It all depends on how it's coming in. Some networks produce clean-ish feeds, some sports provide fully-produced world feeds, but others only make dirty feeds available so we have to make sure we cover all the American commercial breaks and sponsorship "billboards" and you'll get exactly the same on-screen furniture viewers in the US would get.

BT aren't......great at this!

Sometimes the host broadcaster is helpful enough to provide running orders and an AD listen line too, so that the playout director in the UK has a half-decent chance of covering up the bits that aren't meant to make it on air. And sometimes they don't get that information, so they have to use their own skill and judgement. It's not always perfect, hence the 'living hold' when coming back from a break.

Yep. Usually the AD lines give clear direction and they follow the running order perfectly and it's a breeze. But there are those times when there seems to be chaos on the other end of the line or the running order isn't worth the paper it's printed on and you're frantically swapping around breaks and dropping or adding promos on the fly to approximately match the durations they're calling. Makes the time go faster, anyway!

This combination of logos on a repeat of a 1997 FA Cup tie tickled me:

I remember the BBC taking some cricket graphics from Australia once, perhaps for the World Cup, and just slapped a horrible blue quarter globe over the top of the native broadcaster logo.

They learned their lesson for their Super Bowl coverage recently, their BBC Sport logo fitted very nicely on top of the NBC graphics package of the time.

I'm a long-time lurker, but a first-time poster.

And it's probably wrong that my first post should include a correction, but anyway...

The score graphics used at the 2000 and 2001 BDO WCs were the same as the ones used at the '99 WC, only with Gill Sans Bold in place of Helvetica Bold Italic.

And it was during the 2000 WC that the respective numbers of darts thrown by each player during the leg were added, as these "before and after" screenshots demonstrate - the "before" shots from the second-round match between Andy Fordham and Steve Beaton, and the "after" shots from the semi-final between Ted Hankey and Chris Mason:

http://i66.tinypic.com/96gjmd.jpg http://i65.tinypic.com/dlnqrb.jpg
http://i68.tinypic.com/sphtf9.jpg http://i64.tinypic.com/20u1fsw.jpg

The silver, teal and salmon effort used at the 2002 and 2003 WCs was indeed the first to feature possible outs - albeit only three-dart and significant two-dart outs (as demonstrated below), and not one-dart or small two-dart outs (like double top for 40, or 1-double 2 for 5):

http://i64.tinypic.com/2u8a1ok.jpg http://i68.tinypic.com/1se2o7.jpg

Or in other words, I made a typo on my graphic.

I certainly don't mean to knock your work (which I think is excellent BTW ), I just couldn't resist making this correction and adding a bit more info.

And if it's all right with you and everyone else here, I can't resist taking the story back a few years, to 1993...

The '93 WC was, of course, the last before the Split - but it was also the first in which the BBC used astons instead of just white text, and the first in which additional stats were displayed, such as the respective numbers of 180s and the three-dart averages:

http://i65.tinypic.com/2eumq2d.jpg http://i68.tinypic.com/2ywilif.jpg

Of note is the font - ordinary Univers Bold Italic and not the condensed version, as had been the standard BBC Sport font since the introduction of the atom globe in 1988 (and which continued as such until 1996).

1994 saw the addition of the BBC logo - rather awkwardly placed at the bottom left - as well as drop shadows:

http://i67.tinypic.com/b6vuwp.jpg

Things were tidied up a bit in 1995, with the players' points, names and countries more properly aligned and the BBC logo less awkwardly placed at the top left:

http://i68.tinypic.com/2j50yts.jpg

Finally, 1997 saw the font changed to the new standard BBC Sport font - Helvetica Bold Italic - and the addition of the gradient silver strip at the top.